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CITIZENSHIP AND SALVATION 



CITIZENSHIP AND 
SALVATION 



OR 



GREEK AND JEW 



a Stutig in tJje Wlogopijg of f^tstorg 



ALFRED H. LLOYD, Ph.D. (Harvard) 

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY 
OF MICHIGAN 




"WO COPIES RECEIVED 
BOSTON UC?«JS 



LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 
1897 



"C 



THE LIBRARY 
OF CONGRESS 

WASHINGTON 



Copyright, 1897, 
By Alfred H. Lloyd. 



All rights reserved. 



- 



jj It 



©nibewtts Press: 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. 



CONTENTS. 



Part I. 

THE DEATH OF SOCRATES. 

Chapter Pages 

I. Greece 1-34 

II. Rome 35" 62 

Part II. 

THE DEATH OF CHRIST. 

I. JUDEA 63-87 

II. Rome Falls 88-114 

Part III. 

RESURRECTION. 
The Christian State 11 5-142 



Citizenship and Salvation. 



$att I. 

THE DEATH OF SOCRATES. 



T 



CHAPTER I. 

GREECE. 

I. 

HE history of Greece is not as essential a 
part of education as it used to be. It is no 
longer thought to be indispensable to culture. In 
other ways than the way of Greece the rise and 
the fall of ideals and of the institutions embody- 
ing them are studied. Thus in the many biologi- 
cal sciences the same opportunity is found for 
observing the process of adjustment in all its de- 
tails of life and death ; and the same application 
to one's own life is possible, if not inevitable, in 
them. Not history, of whatever events, nor yet 
science, of whatever branch, but application to 
self is what makes for real culture, and at the 
present time the ideal in education seems to be 
to encourage such studies in any individual case as 



Citizenship and Salvation. 



will insure application. So Greek life and thought, 
often found wanting as a means to culture, has 
now and again been supplanted by what have been 
thought to be more living or more practical 
themes. Practice and culture have refused to be 
divorced. 

But, true as the decline of the study of an an- 
cient civilization is, one must not be so narrow as 
to misunderstand it. Any particular study, what- 
ever it be, is always set free when it ceases to be 
indispensable, and to the smaller number of those 
who still turn themselves to it the opportunities 
are increased and the rewards are unspeakably 
enhanced. Specialization, relegation to a few of 
any particular line, deepens and ennobles ; it does 
not degrade ; it brings into the activity all the in- 
creased power, all the exaltation, all the developed 
insight, that the very increase in number of ways 
to truth is evidence of. From the simple nature 
of the case, the special study cannot remain what 
it was when general; it must adjust itself to the 
richer experience of the community in which 
it has become special. If an adjustment from 
within fail, then that subtle form of adjustment 
from without, sometimes known as "translation," 
sometimes as " involution," will be forced upon it. 
The past is ever mortal; only the present can 
survive. 



The Death of Socrates, 



Accordingly in these chapters on the death of 
Socrates I would, so far as possible, fulfil the ideal 
which I have just defined for special study. I 
would, if possible, escape the specialism of those, 
who, though having eyes, refuse to see the living 
present day meaning of what is before them. I 
would be no mere antiquary and no hero-worship- 
per. I would neither exalt nor degrade paganism 
in any of its great achievements. I would simply 
illustrate as clearly and forcibly as I can a prin- 
ciple of life to-day. As a biologist, then, if I may 
assume an unearned title, I would go back to the 
days when Socrates, the great Greek philosopher, 
corrupter of youth, maligner of the Gods, public 
nuisance and offender against the laws, drank the 
fatal hemlock. 

Socrates' life was a life of persistent advocacy 
of an idea, and in his death mankind has seen one 
of the grandest expressions of martyrdom ever 
accomplished in history. Again and again that 
death has been compared even with the sacrifice 
of Christ, and certainly no one refuses to admit 
some parallelism between the careers of the two 
men. There are those, however, who withdraw 
from any close scrutiny of the parallelism, and I 
must withdraw too. although for what at least on 
the surface will hardly seem to be the same rea- 
sons. History, as I conceive it, has such need of 



Citizenship a7td Salvation. 



both characters and both martyrdoms that any 
attempt at comparison appears to me idle. I 
recall a sentence that was originally from Rous- 
seau, but that came to me first through an ele- 
mentary reader, before I had left the lower grades 
of the grammar school. Here it is : " Socrates 
died like a philosopher; but Jesus Christ, like 
a God." Now, my feeling at the time was that 
dying like a philosopher must be something alto- 
gether wicked. In my youthful acceptance of 
the rather attractive sentence, what with its strik- 
ing antithesis and all, I felt sorry on the whole 
for Socrates, and probably the effect on me was 
exactly the reverse of what was intended. I 
wondered why anybody had ever gone to the 
trouble of drawing the contrast if the two cases 
were so unlike, and I have had ever since a keen 
interest in the life and death of Socrates. The 
objection to the contrast or comparison, moreover, 
that I vaguely felt then, I feel still, but of course 
more clearly and more positively. Rhetorical 
antitheses may stir the emotions, but often they 
are not quite honest. They do something that is 
not far from injustice ; they cloud the truth. 
Certainly Socrates lived and died, and his death 
was a martyrdom, and the very idea for which above 
all others Christianity stands — the idea namely of 
the divinity of man — justifies one in saying that 






The Death of Socrates. 



he achieved whatever is essential in the act of 
self-denial. 

Mere comparisons or mere contrasts, therefore, 
aside, I am to look to Socrates and his times for 
some light upon the true nature of self-denial ; I am 
to make a biological study of self-denial. Obvi- 
ously the undertaking will involve a review of the 
events in the life of Greece long before Socrates' 
day, since without this only the most shallow ap- 
preciation of Socrates himself would be possible. 
And, furthermore, for the reason that every action, 
in particular every great action, is chiefly signifi- 
cant as the forerunner of a larger expression of 
itself in nature, or at least in the life immediately 
encompassing its original agent or prophet, the 
completest, the most richly suggestive manifesta- 
tion of that for which Socrates stands in human 
experience will lie in the course of events follow- 
ing his death. I have, then, or rather we have, if 
any other has followed me so far, to consider, in 
the first place, the death of Socrates as the posi- 
tive event at Athens, and, secondly, the death of 
Socrates, in a more abstract or a more spiritual 
sense, as fulfilled in the subsequent fate of Greece, 
when Greece was drawn into the Empire of Rome. 

As for any cherished ideals let us recognize once 
for all that they must rather gain than lose 
through such a study as we are contemplating; 



Citizenship and Salvation. 



and if in the end a truly living appreciation of 
the other sacrifice achieved at Jerusalem is made 
possible, the present labor will have returned 
something that must far exceed in its practical 
worth the temporary satisfaction of any parti- 
san comparison. 

II. 

THE history of Greece shows a race living 
through two very different fears. Thus there 
came first to Greece the fear of annihilation from 
without, and, secondly, the fear of annihilation 
from within. A life with these two fears, more- 
over, is typical. Individuals, men as well as na- 
tions, experience no other. But the case of Greece 
is striking. 

As to the first fear of Greece, the early Greek 
civilization, scattered as it was in independent 
communities through the coast countries of Asia 
Minor, the islands of the ^Egean, and the moun- 
tain-bound districts of Greece proper, fell into 
great danger, not only of attack, but even of con- 
quest from the East and from the South ; and the 
danger as it grew brought about centralization, 
making necessary the unification of a hitherto 
dismembered people. It created in each part a 
demand for men of something more than mere 



The Death of Socrates, 



military sagacity. " Wise men " became the rivals 
of generals. Philosophy, statesmanship, legisla- 
tion, rose into prominence. The idea of a national 
capital came to each of the separate communities. 
And, although in the earlier thoughts of unity no 
one ever even dreamed of centralization at Athens, 
still a single capital of all Greece was inevitable in 
course of time ; for an idea, once afield, is sure to 
break from its assigned bounds. 

But the movement in Greek history towards 
centralization at Athens had another side. No 
fear is without its hope. No necessity is without 
its opportunity. In short, from within as well as 
from without came the demand for unification, the 
outer stimulus in this case, as in all cases, only 
answering to an inner motive. That threatened 
conflict with the barbarians was surely no result 
of wholly external events, for the Greek only 
brought it upon himself; his evolution required 
it; and the device of a national capital was not for 
mere self-defence, but was the necessary outcome 
of self-expression. Thus, at the very moment 
when the danger from without befell them, the 
Greek communities had become conspicuous for 
their prosperity, independence, and aggressiveness 
or outwardly reaching activity; and their pros- 
perity and activity, accompanied as it naturally 
was by the rise of a leisured class and the delega- 



8 Citizenship and Salvation, 

tion of the more commonplace labors to servants 
or slaves, led to conscious reflection. Society be- 
came divided, and if division under such con- 
ditions implies anything of signal importance, 
whether in a society's or in an individual's activity, 
it implies the consciousness of unity as an ideal. 
Not only, therefore, does it make a reflective con- 
sciousness possible, but also it determines the idea 
upon which the consciousness will feed. Indeed, 
unity must be the ideal to all thinking, to all 
consciousness; and in practice this means that 
a division, that is to say, a differentiation or dele- 
gation of functions within the life of a commu- 
nity, by giving rise to a thinking class and so 
bringing the people to a consciousness of itself 
and a sense of the need of unity, will disclose also 
a division or differentiation setting in on a much 
larger scale and including in its movement all 
other communities of like origin in religion and 
general racial experience. The single differen- 
tiated whole will always find itself but a part in an 
inclusive whole, and its desired unity within can 
be secured only through an adjustment without. 
The Milesian, for example, will recall as never 
before that he is also a Greek; brought to the 
point of saying, in the words of one of his wise 
men, that all things are water, his city being so 
nearly an island, his life and prosperity depending 



The Death of Socrates. 



so much upon the waters surrounding him, and his 
gods themselves being born of the sea, he will at 
once perceive that the unity of all things can be 
expressed in terms of any one of them all, that 
unity is something deeper and greater than any 
particular element or than any particular city. 

So, to repeat briefly, an inner prosperity, a 
laboring class, a leisured class, and a reflective 
consciousness are all inseparable phases of a peo- 
ple's life, and in them or in their very inseparable- 
ness we can see how, as has been said, the stimulus 
to unity and centralization which came through 
the danger of attack from without corresponded 
to a motive already realized within. The external 
stimulus had its internal sanction. Else how could 
response, reaction, the centralization itself, ever 
have taken place? No more in history than in 
one's own self-consciousness, than in the feeling 
about one's own activity, is it necessary to be 
deterministic. 

Well, the danger without and the prosperity 
within, the one circumstance as much as the other, 
led to the unification of Greece. But the centrip- 
etal movement was not without what we have to 
see as its natural or logical counterpart, — a cen- 
trifugal movement. If the danger and the pros- 
perity, as two inseparable aspects of the one 
movement in the development of Greece, were 



io Citizenship and Salvation. 

the promise of Athens, they were responsible also 
for the Greek colonies that sprang up along the 
entire Mediterranean coast, and particularly in 
Italy at the west. The danger made the trans- 
planting wise, if not necessary, while the prosperity 
made it possible. Colonization, moreover, as a 
centrifugal movement, illustrates just what we saw 
a moment ago. It shows how unity, as an ideal 
determined by conditions at home, always brings 
positive relations to the larger sphere of life with- 
out. A people's sense of unity makes breaking 
away from the endangered dwelling place no alto- 
gether hopeless change. The world has become 
one essentially, and the people, having risen to an 
independence of its conditions, can settle anywhere 
and still be itself, and its gods, become equally free, 
can go with it. 

Do but pause here, and in order to reflect a 
moment upon it review in your mind so much of 
the general history of Greece as we can now see. 
Thus, in its earlier stages the process that looked 
to the glory and supremacy of Athens is marked 
(i) by the rise in the separate communities of 
thinkers, " wise men," law-makers, whose chief 
interest, of course, is in bringing to light for them- 
selves and their peoples the unity that underlies 
difference ; (2) by threats and even attacks from 
barbarian peoples, in which the sense of difference 



The Death of Socrates. 1 1 

and the end of unity must be greatly quickened ; 
(3) by widening class distinctions within, calcu- 
lated only to intensify the end by making it also 
a natural self-determined impulse; and (4) by 
resort both in self-defence and for more perfect 
self-expression to extensive colonization, in which 
above all else is asserted or enacted the principle 
that all the different parts of the world are essen- 
tially one, that mankind, whatever its original 
ties, can be itself anywhere. And in these marks 
of the process we have plainly no mere group of 
more or less isolated facts, we have rather a 
wonderfully beautiful whole; a fear that is one 
with a hope, a disintegration that is but incident 
to organization, and a wandering off to strange 
lands that is possible only under the same as- 
sumption that is the basis of centralization, Greek 
influence being spread far beyond the places of its 
childhood just in proportion as it is intensified 
and focused. A wonderfully beautiful whole, I 
say; a whole that lives, as we know life in our 
own times ; a whole in whose life one can see, if 
one does but really look, a motive or a spirit 
struggling to free itself; and a whole, finally, 
whose motive or spirit, when one follows it to its 
fulfilment, shows the Athenian Socrates, fulfilment 
of the focusing or centripetal movement, and 
pagan imperial Rome, fulfilment of the spreading 



12 Citizenship and Salvation. 

or centrifugal movement, and the two as insepa- 
rable as we have found Athens and the Greek 
colonies. 

But we must return to the course of Greek his- 
tory itself; we must, however rapidly, follow the 
struggle from the point at which we left it. So, 
— and I begin by making the long story very 
short, — the sense of unity in the world, whether 
as expressed in wars and migrations and political 
changes, or as packed concisely in a philosophical 
formula, has to lead to a sense of the unity of the 
individual self; the outer unity reveals to each 
single person an inner unity; cosmology, as in 
general the science of life without, evolves into 
psychology, the science of life within ; and to the 
rule here indicated the progress of Greece was no 
exception. As said already more than once, the 
external stimulus corresponded to an internal 
motive. The motive, however, had to be in the 
single individual, if it was in the social whole. 
But fully to comprehend the sense of the unity of 
the individual self that came to Greece, we must 
consider the second great fear through which 
Greek civilization passed, the fear of annihilation, 
not from the barbarians — they were repulsed, but 
from the Greeks themselves. 



The Death of Socrates, 13 



III. 

With the second fear what was all but apparent 
in the first is brought into clear light, — this, 
namely, that a people's conflict is never really 
with another people, but rather with itself; that 
the basis of an outer danger is always an inner 
danger. 

Thus Marathon and Salamis and Plataea were 
all that was needed to show to Greece, centred at 
Athens, where her true danger lay. Nothing so 
surely as victory, even at the moment of exulta- 
tion, will disclose where the still unconquered 
enemy lies. After winning so signally her great 
battles Athens soon discovered that the real battle 
had but just begun; that her real assailant, only 
disguised in the armies of the East, was a some- 
thing, a national temptation perhaps, an impulse 
surviving in her nature from the time when the 
Greek race, as shown by its religion, language, and 
institutions, had been one in life and character and 
habitation with the very peoples that came against 
her. She discovered that realization of her inner- 
most ideal or complete expression of her motive to 
unity, which the coming of Xerxes and the others 
only awakened, could never be merely through an 
heroic repulse, grand as that was, in a mountain 



14 Citizenship and Salvation. 

pass, nor through putting to rout a host of ships. 
Such struggles and such victories only postponed 
the final struggle, although in the control that they 
required, in the respect for principle that they 
developed, they served to prepare the people for 
the real contest, compared with which to the his- 
torian in later days Thermopylae and Salamis 
would seem but child's play. 

Those victories begat conceit, self-consciousness, 
self-glorification. The conscious reflection previ- 
ously turned to problems of civil administration 
and foreign policy, found a more attractive field in 
history, in dramatic poetry, and in architecture 
and sculpture and painting. Recall the Athens of 
the days of Pericles, if you would understand this. 
No sooner did Athens become the centre of 
Greece than she began to erect wonderful monu- 
ments of all kinds to her achievements. 

But in the art and literature of Greece it is 
wrong to see a people only paying tribute to its 
past. Art always defines the past, and definition 
of the past sets the future free. The aesthetic con- 
sciousness, then, on which the fine arts depend, is 
quite as much a promise as a reminiscence ; 
it comes at a moment of poise between the past 
and the future, between an acquired freedom and 
the use or application of it, between free but aim- 
less action and duty ; it shows duty for a time in 



The Death of Socrates. 15 

abeyance. In Greek art, accordingly, there was 
more than a golden age, there was the closing in 
of the people's conflict. The expression of expe- 
rience in works of art did for a time make the 
pulse beat faster with pleasure and sense of worth 
and power; but in the end the effect of putting the 
time-honored ways and long-cherished ideals and 
noble deeds and heroes upon the stage — for art 
in all its forms does just that — was to show where 
the battle was yet to be fought, in that it heralded 
an age of rationalism as successor to morality and 
piety and patriotism. Staging life, however rever- 
ently at first, had to lead in time to moral laxity, 
impiety, corruption in political life, and general 
social disintegration. It robbed life of all that had 
given it worth and coherence and power to satisfy 
the moral and religious natures ; it made the tra- 
ditional meaning of life external ; it turned life 
into a form or convention, instead of a content with 
any substantial spiritual worth ; into a something 
merely to be used, a something to which to ad- 
just one's self, rather than what it had been, — an 
inner strength and support. 

In the Greek plays, not to mention other indica- 
tions of the change, natural law, rather as hard 
necessity than as realized opportunity, came to 
succeed the gods in the control of human life ; and 
in order to appreciate the influence of these plays 



1 6 Citizenship and Salvation, 

one must remember, first, that the principal 
theatre seated thirty thousand, those who were 
unable to afford the admission fee being admitted 
at the expense of the city ; and, secondly, that 
hard necessity, fate, as the moral law, is quite alien 
and discouraging to any sense of moral responsi- 
bility. So, if the earlier effect of Greek art was 
aesthetic exhilaration, the later was to make 
sacred things secular, and, as has been said, to in- 
troduce a time of emphasis on mere utility and 
general indifference to anything but a most con- 
ventional morality. The Greek, by his art set 
outside of himself and so exposed to his own 
scrutiny, became in himself, as under the same 
conditions you or I would become, a mere atom, 
an element with no quality but that of number or 
price ; and Greek society, from being the patriotic 
democracy that Pericles had imagined, degenerated 
into a mass of warring members or a composition 
of individuals who lived with each other on suffer- 
ance. In a word, the Greek found himself arrayed 
in a thoughtless, conscienceless,, godless host against 
himself: his own enemy, his own danger, his own 
despair. 

So the Greek in struggle with himself, not with 
himself disguised in a barbarian horde, as if an un- 
recognized but actual and materialized memory of 
himself, but with himself face to face, is the Greek 



The Death of Socrates. 17 

of the second fear ; and, if one may give perhaps a 
new turn to a familiar line, in order to make the 
picture as vivid as possible, " When Greek meets 
Greek, then comes a tug-of-war." At such a time 
neither colonization of any ordinary sort, with its 
wandering off to safer places, nor masterly gener- 
alship, can insure the continuance of a people's 
autonomy. 

The second fear was sharper than the first, so 
sharp indeed that the senses seem to have been 
dulled to it, and naturally enough, since the danger 
of destruction was so great. But the second fear, 
like the first, was not without its hope ; the stimu- 
lus to unity was not without the motive. Was not 
the second struggle a repetition of the first, although 
at very much closer quarters? The struggle had 
not changed ; it had merely become personal, self- 
consciousness having succeeded patriotism ; only 
the scene of action had changed. And yet to show 
the hope or the motive in the Greek's fear is not 
so easy now as it was before. In the later Greece, 
at least to one's first view, there appears only the 
stimulus, only a wholly external interest, in the 
concerns of life. The Greek, it is true, was brave 
in the presence of his great danger, and bravery is 
born of hope and will ; but his bravery was of the 
sort that hides itself, he was brave to the point of 

bravado; he turned his back on his new danger. 

2 



1 8 Citizenship and Salvation, 

Thus, in friendship founded upon utility ; in poli- 
tics plied as a trade through bribery ; in fashion 
prevailing over duty ; in blind fate as the only 
moral law ; in a philosophy scouting all but the 
truth of the senses and teaching only rhetoric and 
oratory and the other forms of a wholly time- 
serving wisdom ; in the Greek person, man or 
woman, become only a commodity on the market ; 
in the Athens of Alcibiades and the Sicilian expe- 
dition, of the mutilation of the Hermes, of the 
Sophists, and of the Spartans as foes, instead of, as 
hitherto, rivals, seeking alliance with Persia, — in 
such a Greece, in such times, it is hard to see any 
positive interest in unity, any personal motive to it. 
But the interest and therefore the motive were 
there ; concealed, perhaps, but real ; unborn, but 
alive, and at least vaguely felt. Even bravado is 
not unconscious. Social relations on sufferance are 
still social. 

The effort of a society to preserve its wholeness 
when its members avow and to all appearances 
practise nothing but individual isolation, is not 
without suggestion of pathos. There is so much 
contradiction in it, so much human perversity. 
But, after all is said, contradiction and perversity 
are the forerunners of progress. In what way, 
however, to show this in the special case before us 
I have found it hard to determine, but for my own 



The Death of Socrates. 19 



thinking no evidence has been so striking as that 
of the standpoint of the mathematicians belonging 
to the same period. Thus, if the people in general 
were trying to keep up a social life, that is, to con- 
tinue the movement that expression of social rela- 
tions involves, in a society whose parts were 
regarded as wholly unrelated members or social 
atoms, and could discover no foundation for such a 
life but an empty conventionality, the mathema- 
ticians and logicians among them, breathing of 
course the same atmosphere, were trying to find 
motion in a space composed of absolutely portion- 
less parts or mere points, and could only conclude 
that motion had no reality save that of an illusion 
of the senses. And, as regards their denial of 
reality to motion, I venture to say that with their 
standpoint you would reach the same conclusion. 
Certainly a space filled only with pure points, 
which are of course nothing but positions, must be 
a space in which distance is of absolutely no im- 
portance, and motion is hardly possible without 
distance. Thus, however many portionless parts, 
or points, you mass into a continuous whole, you 
will never get a space so composed that motion 
from any one to any other part will be at all signifi- 
cant. In such a space motion is literally rest. In 
such a space motion must be either all at once, an 
infinite number of positions being traversed instan- 



2o Citizenship and Salvation. 



taneously, or not at all, an eternity being required 
for an infinitesimal distance. In such a space " the 
flying arrow rests " and " Achilles, swift of foot, can 
never overtake the tortoise." The Greek, then, was 
right so far as he went, but he did not go far 
enough. Motion in a merely composite space is 
an illusion, just as social life in a merely composite 
community is the purest convention; but neither 
the portionless part, the point, nor the social atom, 
the Greek as a commodity with a price, has any- 
thing to do with mere composition. Both are 
positions or centres of relation, so that hidden 
within the very arguments, on which the denials of 
motion and of social life were founded, there was 
an idea which was to give science on the one hand 
and practical life on the other such an impulse 
as had never been known before. The idea was 
simply this, -that reality in any of its phases is not 
composite but relational or organic. 

The Greek Sophists, accordingly, were in reality 
using terms that were much in advance of their 
understanding. They were building better than 
they knew. They were helping the future in 
spite of themselves. " Man is the measure of all 
things," they said, and imagined that so they made 
him & a social atom, living in and for the moment. 
In so many words they declared that, as the flying 
arrow rests, so the social being, in spite of his 



The Death of Socrates. 21 

social life, is only an isolated individual. A society 
of individuals as " measures," however, like a space 
of points as positions or relations, is no atomic 
agglomeration, but a whole whose life expresses 
law or system. Its different parts are parts only 
in name, since in it a universal selfhood that 
knows no parts is brought to the hour of its birth. 
Are the individual members of a society only 
" measures " ? Then is the society itself a mechan- 
ism, and a mechanism presupposes a mechanic. 

Accordingly, as said above, among the Greeks 
of selfishness and a conventional morality there 
was present and active the motive to unity; un- 
born perhaps, but alive and at least vaguely felt. 
The danger was not hopeless; the bravado was 
not vain. 

IV. 

Now what is birth? It is certainly no creation 
of something out of nothing. It is the timely 
formation and appearance, the embodiment and 
the setting free of an organized force, of an ideal 
vitally real and active from the beginning, or let 
us say of a motive which stimulus from without 
has quickened into fulfilment and individuation of 
itself. If, then, you look for the unborn motive in 
the Greece of the second period, you will find it, 
as but just now indicated, in the very cause and 



22 Citizenship and Salvation, 

conditions of the fear. Fate and fashion and 
bribery and sensualism and unbelief, the natural 
incidents of atomism in society, are the motive all 
but realized. They are the pain before the birth. 
They show Greece in mortal conflict with herself. 
They show resistance before achievement. 

Did it ever occur to you that the idea of fate 
can never be anything but a superstition or a time- 
server's excuse? Fate is no blind man's idea, but 
the idea of one who refuses to see his own fuller 
opportunity. Thus to talk about it at all is really 
to use it, and to use it at all is to deny it as fate. 
The Greek public, however, in one way and an- 
other was talking about it and using it. For them, 
then, as for all, it was a suppression of conscience, 
a sop thrown to duty. When, therefore, we see 
them given over to fashion and materialism and 
fatalism, we have to struggle hard with ourselves 
against something very much like a belief in 
spirits, so real seems the working of some spirit 
among them ; and real only the more for their 
refusal to recognize it. As shadows tell of a light, 
so even bribery, obviously one result of fatalism, 
is evidence of a self that does not live for money ; 
and disbelief, of belief; and the real of the mo- 
ment, of that which is real always. We cannot, 
then, hear the Sophists at Athens proclaiming the 
too welcome doctrine of selfishness that " truth is 



The Death of Socrates. 23 

nothing in itself, but man is the measure of all 
things, whether of their existence when they do 
exist or of their non-existence when they do not," 
without hearing from somewhere, from some one, 
whom we may not see at first, the illusion spring- 
ing from our need of explaining the hollow'sound 
in the Sophists' words, without hearing that " in 
the conviction of ignorance is the beginning of 
wisdom," that " he is the wisest who knows that 
his wisdom is in truth worth nothing." I say 
that we have to struggle with ourselves against 
the belief in spirits or something very much like 
it; but fortunately the course of history, as if true 
to the conditions of birth, supplemented the mani- 
festation of an unbelieving people with a living 
personal witness to the hidden motive and the 
suppressed conscience. The spirit, whose voice we 
have seemed to hear, was no spirit ; it was Socrates, 
commonly spoken of as the Father of Philosophy, 
but at least with as much meaning the son. 

Vitally present in the life of Greece from the 
beginning, the very light that cast the shadows of 
the later Athenian life, Socrates came in person at 
just the moment when the time for fulfilment 
seemed darkest, when the shadows were longest 
and deepest. Ahead of his times, some have 
said, but that surely is only a petty conceit. As 
a motive in Greek life, always active and felt, he 



24 Citizenship and Salvation. 

was always ahead of his times, even before he was 
born. He whom the times demanded, implied, 
contained, was hardly premature. He was in 
struggle with his times. He, too, heard the voice, 
or spirit, that we have heard. He was the inner 
motive of Greece that had in spite of all deter- 
mined her destiny from the beginning, and that at 
the evening of her career appeared with the as- 
surance that the conflict was not lost, but that 
in the very moment of greatest despair there was 
opportunity for further and still completer self- 
expression. 

Yes, it seems as if we must have believed in 
Socrates had he never been born, so real is he in 
the history of Greek life; but of course he had to 
be born, so necessary is our belief in him ; so 
impossible is the Greek, become a commodity on 
the market, a measure, a social atom, without 
him ; so all but actual is he in Athens even before 
he lives to walk her streets and cross-question her 
unthinking people ; so completely does a mechan- 
ical social life involve a living mechanic. 

Socrates was himself a Sophist, a true citizen 
of his day, but far more so than any other. He 
faced the teaching and the life of his times 
directly. He took what he heard literally. He 
allowed no temporizing with himself or his expe- 
rience. In his " I know that I do not know " at 



The Death of Socrates. 25 

one stroke he refuted his less candid fellows out of 
their own mouths. Such refutation was irony of 
fate indeed, but it is the only real refutation. In 
his " Know thyself," he showed that the very 
atomism in society, the selfishness and the utilita- 
rianism and the venality, was evidence of a higher 
nature in man ; that man, the measure of all things, 
not in his individual sensuous selfhood, but in 
his universal selfhood, was a living reality. Living 
for the moment, he said in so many words, is 
nevertheless living for all time. " What is jus- 
tice? " he asked, and somebody answered : " Deal- 
ing squarely with one's friends," or " Depriving 
an insane man of his sword," or " Not bullying 
the weak;" but, said Socrates: ''Justice is surely 
no one of these things; justice is simply justice; 
friends or enemies or crazy men or weaklings have 
nothing to do with it. Know thyself as just 
essentially, not as just in this or that moment or 
under these or those conditions." 



V. 

So we have Socrates, without whom Greece had 
not been Greece. His birth was necessary, be- 
cause he was the embodiment of an ideal that lay 
at the very heart of Greek life. But his death was 
necessary also. 



26 Citizenship and Salvation. 

History was not less logical than Socrates' own 
thought, and the Socratic thought itself amounted 
to a decree that its Athenian thinker should die, 
and die, too, as the result of his people's resent- 
ment. The death of Socrates and the manner of 
it were as necessary as his birth. You do not 
understand? But had not this remarkable Greek 
declared that justice had nothing to do with 
friends or enemies, with conditions here and now? 
Had he not said in plainest terms that the just 
man had no need of being an Athenian? What 
more natural, then, than that his fellows should 
take him as literally as he had taken them? His- 
tory is always literal, and often grimly so. 

But Socrates' relation to his times, his conflict 
with them, may be recounted in the following way. 
The notion of the person as a law unto him- 
self or as an end unto himself as means is a com- 
mon one. The self as end is of course the soul ; 
as means, the body; so that the person as having 
both soul and body is an end unto himself as 
means. But Athens, with her social atoms, had at 
her disposal the self as means, and her social 
atomism only shows her become a miser in that she 
insists on taking the means for the end. Her 
Greek was become a commodity, or so much 
material wealth, which she might spend, if she 
would, but like others in the possession of new 



The Death of Socrates. 27 

wealth she hoarded the means instead of using it. 
She was persistently blind to the fact that the 
means presupposed an end already determined, an 
ideal already real. The glitter and the ring of the 
sensuous life that her successes had put into her 
hands, held her spell-bound. And so Socrates 
found her. Yet he did not, as at first thought 
might be expected, break the spell. To be sure, 
he urged upon his people a recognition of the self 
as end ; he bade them live no longer for the many, 
but for the one ; he reminded them of the contra- 
diction and the stultification in such a miserly life 
as theirs was ; above the composite and momen- 
tary he set the indivisible and indestructible ; but 
it takes more than mere negations to break 
spells. 

Socrates did not break the spell that bound 
Athens, because as a matter of fact it bound him 
too. As I have said so many times, he was him- 
self in the struggle of Greece, an integral part 
of it. He shared in the contradiction from which 
the times, whose atmosphere he breathed, could 
not be free. If you hold your right hand before a 
mirror, the reflection is rather of a left hand than 
of a right, the image being symmetrical with the 
object, not similar to it. In much the same way, 
then, Socrates and his life and teachings were 
symmetrical with the life and teachings of the 



28 Citizenship and Salvation, 

Athenian people whom he offended. He only 
reproduced, as if by a mirror's reflection, the con- 
tradiction which they were manifesting; he repro- 
duced it, but the other way around. Thus, if they 
were misers, taking means for end, he was a spend- 
thrift, a reformer, equally impractical, taking end 
for means. He and they, in short, were at one and 
yet in conflict; at one, because belonging to the 
same times, and in conflict, because the times 
were in conflict with themselves. The miser 
and the spendthrift are ever the most natural 
contemporaries. 

In terms somewhat less technical the worldly 
life, which is a hoarding of the means, and the life 
apart from the world, which assumes that the end 
will realize itself, naturally go hand in hand. They 
complement and correct each other, and it is hard 
to say which of them is the more serious departure 
from duty, the worldliness or the abstract spiritu- 
ality ; but certainly both keep fulfilment in abey- 
ance. Imagine a lot of boys in a carpenter's work- 
shop. You know exactly what time-servers they 
will be ; how they will use the things nearest at 
hand ; and how their relations to each other will 
be maintained rather through sufferance than 
through any sense of co-operation in their activi- 
ties. They will call themselves carpenters, but 
they will care more for the seeming than the being 



The Death of Socrates. 29 

such. At last, however, as in time must happen, 
some one will turn upon them and exclaim : 
" Cutting boards or driving nails is not carpentry ; 
nor is chiselling, nor sawing, nor planing ; carpen- 
try is carpentry ; the one, not the many. You 
have called yourselves carpenters long enough. 
Now I am no carpenter, and I know that I am 
not. Do you also dismiss your conceits and know 
yourselves." Of course that is some young 
Socrates among them, and what will be the effect 
of his speech? Will the workshop, albeit well sup- 
plied with tools and materials, be any more pro- 
ductive than it was before? Hardly, or at least 
not at once. Carpentry in the abstract is no more 
productive than the boys' cutting and hammering 
and planing. The first effect of such a speech 
must be a demand from the group that the 
speaker, so wholly out of sympathy with life as he 
finds it, be put out of the way. Certainly that is 
what happened at Athens. Taking the end for 
the means, denying the means, brought quick 
retribution. The misers had no use for the 
reformer. 

And in still another way, besides the symmet- 
rical reflection of the confusion of end with 
means, we can see how Socrates both in his life 
and in his death belonged most vitally to his times. 
Thus he was as active and busy and self-assertive 



30 Citizenship and Salvation. 

as any Greek in Athens. He was no abstract 
thinker; he organized no special school; his 
philosophy went on two legs and was known in 
every corner of Athens. Merchants and politi- 
cians and laboring men and great artists knew 
him, and had experience of the peculiar trade that 
he plied. For Socrates philosophy was no theory, 
but as direct and concrete an activity as any to be 
found in the city. Simply he met like with like. 
He went about from place to place, a self-seeker 
among self-seekers, bent on finding himself, or 
the motive and conscience of which he was the 
embodiment, and on making the active presence 
of these felt in the life of every one with whom 
he spoke. No man ever used others for his own 
self-realization so thoroughly as did Socrates. 
Savages use each others' fingers and toes as 
basis of numerical reckoning, abstract calculation 
being impossible to their untutored minds; but 
Socrates, turning the utilitarianism of his day 
completely back upon itself, used all Athens for 
the development of his thought. He fulfilled 
himself in the very life from which we have seen 
him to have sprung. He made others, in spite of 
themselves, see themselves, a suggestion of their 
duty, a hint of their artificiality, in him. Even his 
death was his use of them. 

So I said above that the execution of Socrates 



The Death of Socrates. 31 

was as necessary as the birth, and this is becoming 
ever more apparent as our thought advances. 
Indeed, the sum of it all is that Socrates con- 
demned and executed himself. We can conclude 
nothing else. Whether we say that his times took 
him literally when he declared justice to be 
simply justice, or that he exalted the end wholly 
at the expense of the means, thereby realizing 
such isolation of himself in Athens as no other 
Athenian, however much imbued with the individ- 
ualism of the time, had ever accomplished, or that 
by his personal efforts throughout the city he 
made the people hate themselves and so most 
naturally condemn themselves in him, — from 
whichever side we approach the matter, Socrates 
stands out as his own destroyer. But, you re- 
mind me, he was brought to trial. That is true. 
Certain forms were complied with. Yet, aside 
from the fact that every reformer brought to trial 
is proved a reformer only if condemned, since 
the law which determines justice at court relies 
altogether on precedent, — aside from this fact, the 
defence of Socrates before his judges was but a 
short yet telling repetition of the career for 
which he had been brought to trial, so that the 
judges had no choice but to feel that out of his 
own mouth he had condemned himself. More- 
over, the Socrates, as a condemning conscience, 



32 Citizenship and Salvation. 

already awake within themselves, made them all 
the readier to accept the fatal evidence of the 
defence. Those, in general, who have been made 
to feel their own conviction of error are not dis- 
posed to make a careful discrimination in the 
case of another among them. Indeed, so vitally 
organic is the life of a society, condemnation of 
another is but self-condemnation. In other words, 
the presence of the motive in Greek life, which 
had made the birth of Socrates not possible, but 
necessary, was just that which through its birth 
in the conscious experience of the people made 
his execution inevitable. So, once more, without 
any effort at mere subtlety, literally, Socrates 
executed Socrates. 



VI. 

But this was to be a study of self-denial. Where 
now is the self-denial? So far we have found 
nothing of the kind. In the martyrdom of Soc- 
rates we have found only self-expression. Had 
the execution been unjust, had Socrates and 
his teaching been no inner motive of the life 
and times in which he found himself, had he 
been a mere harmless spectator in some hidden 
part of the city, had he taken no part in the 
Greek's struggle with Greek, in no way sharing 



The Death of Socrates. 33 

in the contradiction of the day, had he been 
simply the Socrates that so much history and 
so much shallow sentiment have been fond of 
telling us all about, a man quite alone at Athens, 
literally ahead of his times, unappreciated, unreal, 
alien, even miraculous, then we might talk of 
self-denial. But the living Socrates of Greece's 
second fear, whether we see him at his trade, 
an artisan among artisans in the streets and 
by-ways of the city, or at his trial, or in the 
prison-cell with the cup of poison upon his lips, 
the living Socrates never denied himself. He 
ever showed exactly what he was. The self that 
he expressed, was, and was living and active and 
upon this earth before Athens sacrificed him or 
before he, as some would have it, denied himself. 
In a word, his death did not bring him into new 
life. It only proved his old life. 

But, says somebody, no one has ever meant 
anything else by self-denial than just such self- 
expression. On the contrary, I think, as I have 
already hinted, that self-denial has often, if not 
usually, meant some unnatural thing, something 
requisite to secure the freedom of an unnatural in 
the sense of a supernatural selfhood ; that is to 
say, self-denial has been regarded as a way to a 
remote not yet realized life, a sort of tool useful to 
an as yet unsaved and unfulfilled self. But what 

3 



34 Citizenship and Salvation. 

an impractical and unspiritual sentiment ! As if a 
selfhood worth saving for eternity were not already 
secure, and not only secure but also active. True, 
self-denial is not without significance as a means to 
an end, but the end in its case, as in all cases, is 
real before, not merely after the use of the means ; 
it is an active motive within so soon as it is a goal 
without. Thus the life and death of Socrates have 
shown to us the spiritual Socrates alive before the 
execution ; nay, even before the birth. Socrates 
was born with his true self already real and active, 
so that perfectly direct expression, not salvation 
through self-denial, was his first duty, and he 
proved himself worthy of the responsibility. 

In the next chapter we shall see how the true 
and spiritual self of Socrates continued to live after 
as it had lived before the life at Athens, and how 
on a larger scale, among nations rather than 
within a single people, the life and death of Soc- 
rates were repeated. And then, if possible, even 
more positively than now, self-denial will prove to 
be the way to the expression of an already active 
life, of an already living ideal. 



The Death of Socrates. 35 



CHAPTER II. 

ROME. 

I. 

TT will be remembered that in an earlier para- 
graph of the former chapter the statement was 
made that every act, in particular every great act, 
is chiefly significant as the forerunner of a larger 
expression of itself in nature or at least in the life 
that immediately encompasses its original agent or 
prophet. Whatever an individual agent does, this 
means, sooner or later becomes or tends to become 
the action of a group large or small. Examples of 
this are plentiful, but it is perhaps most obvious in 
industrial division of labor, where an activity origi- 
nally confined to one becomes the differentially 
shared activity of a number. Division of labor or 
functions, however, is not confined to industry in 
the narrow sense; it is a law of all adjustments, of 
all organic evolution. Just why, furthermore, the 
social repetition of an individual's act takes place 
is not hard to see, since, as we have discovered so 
positively in the case of Socrates, the original act 



36 Citizenship and Salvation. 

is not the result of the expression of an impulse 
belonging solely to the individual ; it comes from 
an impulse shared by him with all, so that his 
expression cannot but stimulate a repetition by the 
group to which he belongs. The group first acted 
in him, then he in them; he is but a leader, a 
prophet, one who has revealed to his fellows the 
necessities or opportunities of their nature; and 
not only does his act call out a reassertion of itself 
by him as in them, but also the reassertion is 
single, not multiple, since he has shown to them a 
nature that they have in common and that they 
must therefore express together. He makes them 
act as one. 

Especially, it was said, is this social repetition 
true of great acts ; and this, because greatness con- 
sists in the degree with which an impulse existing 
in society, a motive, dormant perhaps but real in 
the community, is brought into expression by an 
individual. Socrates in his death fulfilled such an 
impulse, and just for this reason was his death, or 
rather his action, the natural forerunner of the same 
action on the part of his race. His death was 
their doom; no, not their doom, but, by as much 
as Socrates himself realized a higher ideal of life, 
their hope and opportunity. In other words, the 
death of Greece is not to be looked upon as due 
merely to the Roman conquest, which approached 



The Death of Socrates. 37 



fulfilment as Athens declined; it was equally the 
outcome of a motive in Greek life; it was inner 
self-expression, not self-denial ; and the real agent 
in the process was not less Socrates as surviving in 
the life of his people than Rome. Hints have 
already forced themselves upon us that Socrates 
was but a Greek forestalling Rome. 

If I say that Socrates lived as an active selfhood 
after his execution I am sure to be misunderstood 
in many ways. But that is just exactly what I have 
to say. He lived after his death, even as truly as 
he had lived before his birth. Indeed, in so far as 
we can understand his death only as self-expres- 
sion, what conclusion is possible but this of his 
after life? By his after life, however, we can here 
refer to no spiritual, unworldly existence, nor can 
we mean, as some might imagine from a too literal 
acceptance of the words, existence on earth as 
some ghostly agent. The meaning here is far more 
practical, if not also far more inspiring to religious 
feeling. The very last thing intended is advocacy 
of spiritualism of any kind. Socrates' after life is in 
the activity, it is literally the activity of the Greek 
people carrying their struggle with themselves to 
its inevitable end in the supremacy of Rome, 
which, be it repeated, was as much their victory as 
Rome's. Socrates survived his death as the same 
selfhood which he had brought to so perfect an 



38 Citizenship and Salvation, 

expression, the selfhood that before his birth had 
been the innermost motive of Greece, and that 
after his execution became her own freed activity. 
So the death of Socrates, in the second manifesta- 
tion of it which we are to study, in its repetition in 
the death of his people, means fulfilment also ; 
denial of Greece, perhaps, and of Greek institu- 
tions, but certainly not self-denial of the deeper 
Greek character, rather its more perfect self- 
expression in the rise of Rome. 

II. 

We need here to define still more clearly, or 
more concretely, just in what the greatness of 
Socrates and the value of his achievements con- 
sisted. It does not seem quite enough to say after 
the manner of rather abstruse thought, that in him 
the Greek at last overcame himself. More in de- 
tail, Socrates achieved a victory over that beset- 
ting sin of Greek life, in the later as well as in the 
earlier times, which historians never fail to dwell 
upon but often fail to appreciate, namely, the in- 
ability to act in unison. Such inability was shown 
first in the petty jealousies of the different peoples 
during the foreign wars, and secondly in the subse- 
quent individualism at Athens ; but what the his- 
torians have often overlooked is that this sin, yes, 



The Death of Socrates. 39 

this besetting sin, springing no doubt among other 
things from the geographical characteristics of the 
country, was not " original," but presupposed a 
co-existing motive to something better. Had the 
sin been " original," there could hardly have been 
any struggle ; resistance to Persia would not 
merely have been idle but altogether unnatural ; 
the different ways in which the Greeks met Persia, 
the centralization and the colonization would have 
been impossible movements in history ; Socrates 
himself would have been a Persian slave, and hap- 
pier so, instead of the Greek prophet that he was. 
And from the other side, if the Greek peoples had 
acted in perfect unison, if their jealousies had been 
quite absent, if the motive for union had been per- 
fectly free, with no sin to make a conflict, the ap- 
proach of barbarian Persia, supposing that it could 
ever have taken place, would not have suggested 
to Greece even the shadow of a danger, and there 
had been no Athens, no Greek art, and none of 
that independence of spirit that carried the Greeks 
to so many remote parts of the Mediterranean ; 
there had been simply a Greek empire, in which 
life had been as thoroughly at a level as was ever 
realized in any oriental dynasty you might name. 
Greece's besetting sin was as much the salvation 
of the Greek as his destruction ; her mountain 
ranges, her peninsulas, and her islands, were limi- 



40 Citizenship and Salvation. 

tations that developed into freedom and world- 
wide opportunity, not of oriental existence, but of 
occidental action. 

Over Greece's besetting sin of inability to act in 
unison Socrates achieved a signal victory. But we 
have seen that the struggle in which Socrates took 
part at Athens was the renewal at much closer 
quarters of the previous struggle in the foreign 
wars ; in it, we said, the Greek found himself face 
to face with himself, as his own strongest enemy ; 
and if that view of the case was the right one, then 
the victory of Socrates, of the Greek over himself, 
ought somehow to revert to the earlier conflict and 
prove to be also, not a repulse, but a complete 
conquest of the very barbarians, disguised in whom 
the Greek had first attacked himself and been so 
brilliantly routed. The later victory must have 
included and perfected the former. But exactly 
such a reversion did take place. Socrates' death, 
we shall find, proved to be in fact, as well as in 
the ideal or the spirit of it, a conquest or a sure 
promise of the conquest of the barbarians. 

How best to make this clear I hardly know, 
and yet the task ought not to be so very diffi- 
cult. It is not quite enough to say that Socrates 
widened Greece into Rome and that Rome included 
in her empire the barbarian enemies of Greece; nor 
does it suffice to point out that the Greek colo- 



The Death of Socrates. 41 

nists, having so much of the spirit or motive that 
we have identified with Socrates, did but at first 
retreat before the danger of destruction as if in 
order later, as Romans, to return from the west 
and conquer rather than merely drive away the 
enemy. These are indications, but any complete 
explanation must go deeper. 

Colonization and political centralization, as 
Greece herself has shown, and as history in many 
other instances has made manifest, are the two 
natural ways of defence and preservation at a 
moment of national danger. The centripetal 
movement and the centrifugal movement, more- 
over, we have seen, are not so much two move- 
ments as two phases of one. But these ways are 
obviously only means to repulse; they are not 
means to complete conquest; and why is this? 
Simply because in either there is a certain incon- 
sistency, a contradiction, that shows the defence 
offered to be an imperfect one, and that therefore 
must modify or limit the success. Thus, as to the 
inconsistency, the colonist seems to say: "I am 
quite independent of place and tradition ; I can go 
to the west, taking my household goods and my 
gods with me, and there continue to be myself; " 
but is it not perfectly clear that, if he were truly 
so independent, he would not need to move, he 
would not need to leave his birthplace at all? He 



42 Citizenship and Salvation. 

contradicts himself when he goes down to his ship. 
Similarly, as to the contradiction in the other way 
of defence, political centralization must be in terms 
of something more than a geographical centre, if 
it is to bring about a real unity. A geographical 
capital implies also an assertion of independence 
of place, but it realizes itself through use of a par- 
ticular place. Clearly in the face of such contra- 
diction, defence can end only in repulse. Conquest, 
the limit, the perfection of repulse, can come only 
if the independence that colonization and political 
centralization assume is real and absolute. In the 
history of life about the Mediterranean, however, 
such absolute independence of space and time, of 
locality and tradition, was asserted in just the two 
events which we are endeavoring to connect, — the 
death of Socrates and the far-reaching empire of 
Rome. Socrates taught, and in his death enacted 
what he taught, that there was a higher selfhood 
than the selfhood of the place and the moment; 
and Rome, not less magnificent in her assertion, 
was established on the idea of a universal empire 
to be maintained not so much through the city of 
Rome, as a geographical capital, as through the 
Roman law, in which of course distinctions of 
place and time were transcended. Socrates and 
Rome, under whom repulse passed into conquest, 
represent the two original ways of defence, the 



The Death of Socrates, 43 

centralization and the colonization, perfected ; they 
show the very principle of defence set free and 
become fully effective. Socrates said and enacted, 
as if in the spirit of those who had identified 
motion with rest, " Perfect colonization is staying 
just where you are; " and Rome put a check upon 
colonization and gave a new interpretation to cen- 
tralization by proclaiming: " Wherever man is, he 
is a Roman." In the legal status that every man 
in the empire, or for that matter, too, every man 
out of it, was given by Rome, freedom of space 
and time was asserted. Rome did but make her 
subjects positions or " measures" absolutely. 

So we see what Socrates achieved, or at least 
the promise there was in his achievement. His 
victory did revert to the early struggles of his 
country; in him the earlier enemies were com- 
pletely overcome. In his individual career, then, 
Socrates enacted what Rome in her larger repeti- 
tion of Socrates' life subsequently accomplished ; 
and whether we see the later process as the death 
of Greece or as the rise of Rome, the repetition of 
Socrates' self-expression is beyond question, and, 
whatever grandeur is to be seen in the power and 
extent of Rome, in that he had a share. 



44 Citizenship and Salvation. 

III. 

But Rome was not built in a day, and our first 
interest at this time is rather in the death of 
Greece as a repetition of the death of Socrates 
than in the rise of Rome. So, having seen the 
larger implication of Socrates' achievement, we 
have again to return to Athens, the unhappy city 
destined to outgrow herself. 

Our last view of Athens was, if you remember 
from the former chapter, of a city of misers, among 
whom had arisen as their most natural contempo- 
rary a reformer, and who with perfect naturalness 
eventually put their would-be reformer to death. 
By misers we meant hoarders instead of spenders 
or users of the sensuous life, while in the reformer 
we saw one who as unduly exalted the end of self- 
hood as his miserly fellows were exalting the 
means. All this we dwelt upon at some length. 
But with our present interest in Greek activity 
after the execution we have now to ask ourselves 
just what occurred at Athens in the days following 
the departure of Socrates. Socrates had made 
himself felt; nay, he had made himself active in 
the life of his people; he had stimulated into 
expression by them a dormant motive. But with 
what result or in what way did the change show 
itself among them? 



The Death of Socrates. 45 

Certainly after that expression, in which not 
only Socrates but also in him his assailants were 
condemned, Athens could not remain what she 
had been; with the motive which Socrates had 
set free become active in her life, a change had to 
show itself. Socrates did what Arnold von Win- 
kelried did ; and not less successfully, except that 
in the case of the Swiss patriot the action was 
much more rapid : he made his assailants die with 
him, using them, as was said above, for his own 
complete self-expression; but just how? 

In this way, and perhaps the very reverse of 
what many would expect, forgetting how human 
mankind must always be ; in a way that will seem 
to take the Greeks farther than ever from Socrates 
instead of nearer to him. Thus the effect of Soc- 
rates upon Athens was to make the people turn 
the miserly, sensuous life that they had been 
leading rather unreflectively than consciously, into 
an avowed ideal. He simply made them resolve 
to be what they had been. 

Nothing could have been more natural. Nothing 
could have been more fatal. In so insisting upon 
continuing to be themselves, in setting before 
themselves their former life as henceforth a con- 
sciously held ideal, a unifying principle, they gave 
up the case in toto to their condemned reformer, 
since unity was just that for which Socrates had 



46 Citizenship and Salvation. 

died. They showed themselves, then, hypnotized 
into dying with him. They testified to his after-life 
in them. Thus, in detail, they had been selfish, 
sensuous, seekers of individual momentary pleas- 
ure and advantage, but now they made pleasure 
their goal or standard, and, if you will reflect a 
little, you cannot but see that seeking pleasure 
consciously is a very different thing indeed from 
getting it or having it. No one, so thoroughly as 
a self-conscious pleasure-seeker, is taken out of 
the positive, practical, concrete relations of life; 
ever less reality adheres to things in which before 
the self-consciousness he had taken so much de- 
light ; he finds himself aloof as a result of his reso- 
lution to continue in active relation. The Greek 
pleasure-seekers came to deny Athens and Athe- 
nian life as completely as their inimitable teacher 
had done. Indeed, some of them, more alive to 
the fatal paradox into which Socrates had drawn 
them, said directly that pain, not pleasure, separa- 
tion from the world and its ties, not identification 
with it, was the right standard of life ; and one, 
namely, Plato, the most faithful pupil of the 
master, withdrew from positive relations to life 
generally into a select school of philosophy, the 
Academy, and there taught the withdrawal that 
he had so enacted. Abstraction, meditation, rem- 
iniscence, he said, was the way to live; and, 



The Death of Socrates. 47 

expressing the same thing in his remarkable dia- 
logues in which the life of Socrates was dramati- 
cally reproduced, he taught through them about a 
world of the One, of the immaterial but substantial 
Idea, in which justice was really justice, and self- 
hood was free from the bondage of particular places 
and particular moments. The conscious pleasure- 
seekers, you see, and the Academy of Plato, in 
spite of their reputed opposition, were perfectly 
natural contemporaries, being advocates of one 
and the same principle; they were as naturally 
contemporaries as their forerunners, the misers 
and the reformer, had been. In its two comple- 
mentary aspects they disclose to us the continu- 
ance of the Greek's struggle with himself, and give 
signs of its end ; they show that larger repetition 
of the Socratic activity in which we are here in- 
terested setting in strongly, irresistibly. 

Now, if you will look closely at this later Athens 
of Plato 1 and the pleasure-seekers, you cannot 
fail to see there an invitation or a positive prepa- 
ration for a well-known event in Greek history, — 
the rise of the Macedonian power under Philip 

1 Plato had reason enough to teach metempsychosis. Was 
not the Greek leaving his own body, his own institutions, his own 
peculiar life in all its phases ? Was not his body, or his civiliza- 
tion, already beginning to crumble ? Whither could Plato have 
him go, if not into another body or another civilization ? The 
fact is, too, that into another civilization he did go. 



48 Citizenship and Salvation. 

and his son Alexander the Great. When a people 
abstracts itself, when it withdraws from the posi- 
tive relations of its life, when it divorces means 
and end even to the point of stopping both its 
hoarding on the one side, — the hitherto active 
misers becoming reflective pleasure-seekers, — and 
its spending on the other, — the early activity of 
reform turning aside from the streets and market- 
places and entering a school, — then must ensue, 
not cessation of activity altogether, but larger ac- 
tivity or activity in which the very divorce of means 
and end among the people will be fulfilled, that is 
to say, the end of which will enter from without 
and make use of the unused means. In fact, a veri- 
table evolution ensues. And just such a fulfilment 
or evolution of Plato's time, Philip and Alexander 
effected ; they took Athens at her word, applying 
or enacting what she thought; they demonstrated 
that divorce of means and end at Athens meant 
their union in a process, an historical movement, 
quite inclusive of Athens, in a word, that Plato's 
Athens had quite outgrown herself. 

And upon the union of means and end, Aris- 
totle, the third great Socratic philosopher, in- 
sisted; but Aristotle, tutor to Alexander and 
protege of the Macedonian court, did not develop 
his thought from the standpoint of one, like Plato, 
living in Athens, but from that of those political 



The Death of Socrates. 49 



changes that were drawing Athens into a life as 
much deeper as it was more extensive than her 
life had been. Aristotle, in every branch of his 
philosophy, which he made so extensive and so 
varied that it seemed as if he intended to rival 
Alexander in its domain, taught that selfhood is 
realized by no withdrawal from material condi- 
tions, but rather by adjustment to them or action 
in them; selfhood is their perfection or fulfil- 
ment; the soul is not an end by itself, but the end 
or purpose of the body. Thus, as showing at once 
the wider and the more practical and worldly 
standpoint of Aristotle's ideas, there is his notion 
of the state as having its basis, not in some 
philosopher's dream, not in some far-off Utopia, 
where Plato imagined it, not in an unworldly some- 
where, but in so real and present and practical a 
thing as the human family. In the human family 
the sta^e was a means unto itself as end. Of 
course distinctly Athenian institutions had to fall 
before that idea; but after all the idea was of their 
own developing, and certainly nothing could have 
been more perfectly in line with the efforts of 
Alexander to spread his empire to the east and 
the south and wherever the human family could 
be found. 

The practical way, furthermore, in which Aris- 
totle interpreted Plato to himself, or in which 

4 



5<d Citizenship and Salvation. 

Macedonia fulfilled Athens, revealing her evolu- 
tion to her, has still another side. Thus to Mace- 
donia as the direct agent in the process now 
before us, and Aristotle as the accompanying 
interpreter or philosopher of it, we owe the clear 
notion of the world as the embodiment or the 
incarnation of reason, or, more technically, the 
doctrine of the \6yos, or Word Incarnate. Athens, 
outgrowing herself, separated end and means, 
mind and matter, soul and body; but Macedonia, 
as has been shown, enacting and fulfilling that 
outgrowth, brought these factors together again. 
Athens developed an abstract learning; but Mace- 
donia carried Greek learning wherever she went 
with her conquering armies, turning the once 
despised barbarians not merely into Greek sub- 
jects, but often into Greek sages. Under Alex- 
ander she founded the city of Alexandreia in 
Egypt, and there Greek wisdom came into relation 
with Hebrew wisdom, and each thought it had 
discovered itself anew. Reason so long shut up in 
Athens found herself the right and privilege of 
man the world over, a property of the world rather 
than a conceit of the Greek; and in his doctrine 
of the \6yos, the world-reason, Aristotle gave a 
philosopher's recognition of this change. 

But Socrates would not have been content with 
the empire of Alexander; and Greece, in whom 



The Death of Socrates. 5 1 

the Socratic motive was now active, was not. The 
Greek's victory over himself had to be still more 
complete. Had he not shown this himself when 
he assisted Hannibal against Rome? His indi- 
vidual selfhood, broadened as it had been by the 
recent events, was still his, whereas a universal 
sellhood was his inevitable because his self-de- 
termined goal. In his very learning, that Mace- 
donia fostered so faithfully, he still kept himself 
in so far aloof; he still confused means and end ; 
he was not perfectly free as means to himself, as 
end. Yet how could such freedom come? Surely 
only through his taking literally the doctrine of the 
world-reason, and therein resigning his individual 
reason completely; only through his entrance 
into an empire other than the Macedonian, in 
no wise Greek, for which Greek ideas and Greek 
institutions would have no intrinsic value. When, 
then, in the middle of the second century before 
Christ, Greece became a Roman province, the 
accomplishment of this more perfect freedom was 
all but at hand, the only drawback being that not 
until some years later was Rome herself altogether 
free. And in this conquest, I must reiterate, Rome 
did but take Greece at her word, even as Mace- 
donia had taken Athens. In each case it was as 
if the conqueror had said to the conquered, 
"Not to destroy, but to fulfil." " To die is gain," 



52 Citizenship and Salvation. 

Socrates had said in his last words before his 
judges, when the verdict of death had been passed 
upon him. 

But Greece resisted Rome, some one says in 
objection to this easy-going way of taking most 
tragic events of history, and also efforts had been 
made earlier to throw off the Macedonian yoke. 
Very true ; but so did even the man Socrates rise 
up to defend himself against his assailants. No 
great change is without a struggle, but we seek 
here a view of history that is deeper than battles 
and leagues and mere conquests. Our own life is 
not without its struggles, and that of Greece was 
not; but still, to repeat a now familiar assertion, 
the death of Greece, like the death of her prophet 
Socrates, was far from self-denial, it was more 
perfect self-expression. Had not the ideal of 
Rome first showed itself in Alexander? And did 
not Alexander bring into material expression and 
so realize an ideal born in Athens? 



IV. 

It was said a moment ago that the Greek to 
fulfil himself must take Aristotle's doctrine of the 
world-reason literally, sacrificing his own individual 
reason wholly. This seems to mean that he must 
abandon his science and philosophy and conceit 



The Death of Socrates, 53 

of knowledge in any form ; and what else could it 
mean but that? Had not Socrates himself exalted 
the conviction of ignorance far above any assump- 
tion of knowledge? To be sure, after Socrates 
had come Plato, with his monumental system of 
philosophy; but Plato and the general attitude of 
abstraction in his times were only natural prede- 
cessors of Macedonia and Aristotle. Yes, the 
Greek had no final choice but avowal of igno- 
rance. The reason was, after all, the world's, not 
his. The ultimate effect of Socrates and Plato 
was to make him purely passive and intellectually 
receptive. Abstraction in thought and life, con- 
viction that truth is a report, not of this, but of 
some other world, with which we have no direct 
connection, upon which we have no hold through 
our senses, must ever end so. After reminiscence 
comes revelation. 

The Greek went to the east and to the south, 
and found his own thought in others ; and while the 
first feeling that came to him was one of triumph, 
the second was one of submission. Rome fol- 
lowed Macedonia in his mental as well as in his 
political life. In Athens, although the Academy 
lived long after Plato, its philosophy rapidly de- 
veloped from the beautiful system that Plato had 
conceived to a more serious, because a so much 
deeper, scepticism than Socrates had ever to con- 



54 Citizenship and Salvation. 

tend with, and at Alexandreia, where the Greek 
was so much freer from himself, as a result of 
the thought interchange, particularly between the 
Hebrews and the Greeks, there arose a philosophy, 
that had its advocates abroad as well, to the east 
in Syria and to the west in Rome, in which such 
mystical ways of arriving at truth as " swooning 
into the absolute " came to be taught. Truth was 
regarded as something that must come ; it was no 
longer something to be sought. It belonged to 
the world, remember; not to man. 

In the life of such as still retained some practical 
hold on reality, whether at Rome or at Athens, 
two distinctly moral systems of thought, in which 
essentially the same mental attitude was present, 
found support, namely, Stoicism and Epicurean- 
ism ; both expressing one interest and need of life, 
but from opposite sides. Thus the Stoic dwelt 
upon the idea that the reason was wholly the 
world's, perfect conformity or submission to it 
being the only way to happiness. " The condition 
of mind to be sought after," he declared, " is 
apathy; " " pain is no evil; '' "nothing can hap- 
pen contrary to the will of the wise man." But 
Epicurus and his following dwelt, not on reason as 
the world's, but on reason as not man's. Man, 
they said, has in himself no rational part, no 
nature to survive his sensuous consciousness ; 



The Death of Socrates. 55 

pleasure here on earth is his natural goal ; with 
no responsibility to any other than the sensuous 
life, what has he to fear but himself? Any other 
fear — above all, the fear of death — is idle ; and, 
to quote at some length from Epicurus himself: 

" The knowledge that death has nothing to do 
with us makes what is mortal in life truly enjoyable, 
not because it adds to life immortality, but because 
it takes away our longing for immortality. For 
there is nothing which can terrify a man in life 
when he is assured that nothing is terrible in the 
absence of life. So that he is a fool who tells us to 
fear death, not because its presence will torment 
us, but that its anticipation torments us. For that 
which troubles us not when it is come has vain 
terrors for us when it is looked forward to. Death, 
then, the most awful of ills, is nothing in our eyes ; 
for, when we are, death is not, and when death is, 
we are not." 1 

With such bold resignation the Epicureans were 
even better Stoics than the Stoics themselves ; the 
reason, or law, or undying nature, that was not 
man's but the world's, the Epicureans wished to 
forget altogether. Indeed, as if catching this im- 
plication, alike of Stoicism and of Epicureanism, 
some especially original thinkers of the day set 

1 Translation from W. L. Courtney's Studies in Philosophy, 
p. 48. 



56 Citizenship and Salvation, 

up an absolute forgetfulness as the only road to 
reality. 

But such attitudes of mind show Aristotle's de- 
votion to the world-reason in application. All 
in their several ways expressive of submission, they 
show how in the history of Greece, as well as in 
that of Mediterranean life generally, man was be- 
coming literally a means to an end, and, too, a 
means to himself, his deeper, truer self, as the real 
end, since, as we have seen particularly in the case 
of the Greeks, the change had more than an ex- 
ternal cause. A motive lying deep in the Greek 
character had required it; a motive, present in 
Greek life and thought from the beginning, 
strengthening with time and experience, and 
finally revealed and brought into social expression 
by the life and death of Socrates, had demanded 
this evolution of man as means, his ready submis- 
sion to an end quite apart from himself, in that his 
own sensuous consciousness had no claim upon it, 
his perfect conviction of ignorance and helpless- 
ness, and politically his acceptance of a legally 
determined position in the empire of military 
Rome. Taking Aristotle's world-reason literally, 
— he had to take it so for his own self-being, — he 
became but one in an organized army, in whose 
movements we see the very principle for which 
Socrates had died at last set free, — the principle, 



The Death of Socrates. 57 

namely, of a universal self, or a common humanity, 
or of an end in life that transcends the life of the 
body, making the body naught but part of a great 
mechanism. 

But we see more than this. It will be remem- 
bered that upon observing carefully the Athens of 
Socrates' time we had to believe in Socrates al- 
most before we really found him in person among 
the people. Now, however, in the events and 
thoughts of these later times another necessity of 
belief is forced upon us. The fall of Greece, which 
has been to us but a repetition or a fulfilment of 
the death of Socrates, the scepticism, the resigna- 
tion, the individual lost in a mechanism the end of 
whose activity must have seemed to each single 
creature living in it not of this world at all, — else 
the movement could never be as free as the times 
and changes required, — the fall of Greece, the 
second death of Socrates in the conquest of his 
race, with all its incidents, was the birth of Christ. 
St. Augustine, with unconscious subtlety, writing 
some years later, epitomized the whole story, the 
scepticism and all, the death and the birth, when 
he gave his proof of the existence of God. In 
brief: Fallor y ergo Dens est; man's deception, 
man's blindness, is revelation of God's existence. 
History, you see, lived or enacted that proof, long 
before the great Church father discovered any valid- 



58 Citizenship and Salvation. 

ity in it. Fallor — that is the death of Socrates, 
— "I know that I do not know; " ergo Dens est — 
that is the birth of Christ — in Rome, — " He that 
loseth his life for my sake shall find it." Not self- 
denial, however, let us keep in mind, but self- 
expression was in the death of Socrates. 



You do not see the necessity of Christ, whether 
in St. Augustine's logic or in the history that it un- 
wittingly epitomized so wonderfully? Then, again, 
reflect a little. The history shows: Reason no 
longer man's, but the world's ; forgetfulness, the 
successor of reason in man ; man himself become 
but a means to the world's end ; universal empire ; 
militarism or mechanism; and, finally, action or 
movement, since the mechanism was hardly at 
rest. But this action or movement — what of it? 
It did what action always does : it made the con- 
ditions that determined its possibility or that set it 
free, — it made those conditions ideal ; and ideal in 
no visionary way, since the action had proved the 
ideal alive. 

And what, to repeat, was the ideal, the living 
reality of which the action or movement of military 
Rome revealed? What was its content or its gos- 
pel? Why, as already suggested, exactly what 



The Death of Socrates. 59 



the history showed : the self as means, forgetful- 
ness, reason as not man's but the world's, and the 
rest, except that of necessity the action or the 
movement turned these into self-denial instead of 
merely self as means, faith in or revelation of the 
world's reason instead of forgetfulness, and free- 
dom instead of slavery to mechanism. The action 
did but glorify its conditions. 

But in these later terms the revealed ideal, liv- 
ing, active, upon the earth, was Christ, liberator of 
the world, the world-reason, the Word Incarnate, 
the supreme example of self-denial. In the very 
movement of Rome's armies, then, in the action 
of the legally established mechanism, lay the ne- 
cessity of Christ, or the real cogency of St 
Augustine's proof. Romans had no choice but 
to believe in Christ. Did they not believe in 
themselves? To the Greeks Paul could preach 
an unknown God, worshipped by them but in 
ignorance ; but to the Romans, only a God the 
principle of whose nature was already the basis 
of the authority of their Imperator, the sanction 
and motive of their Roman life, the law that they 
were unto themselves. 

Plainly the Christ to which we refer was more 
than the individual character of history; he was 
more than the Jewish reformer. Just as we have 
spoken of Socrates in a deeper sense than that having 



60 Citizenship and Salvation. 

reference to the martyred Greek at Athens, so has 
Christendom always thought of Christ in a deeper 
sense than that with reference to Christ the Jew. 

In the history of the Jews themselves the idea 
of Christ passed through several stages. He was, 
as we know, first a world-ruling Messiah, a King 
who was to come and give the Jews, so long in- 
ured to captivity, a mastery over all nations; 
secondly, he was, in a more spiritual sense, a 
Saviour, but a Saviour only of the Jews; thirdly, 
he was Saviour of the World, as if in response to 
the Roman conquest of his people ; and, finally, — 
and this at the crowning moment of his death, 
that that death might also mean self-expression, 
not self-denial, — he was the vital principle of salva- 
tion; reason on Earth; God, not a man among 
men, but a motive at last real and active in human- 
ity ; not an abstract principle, as some, too ready 
to refuse to Christ any objective reality, any real- 
ity save that of an inspiring idea, have tried to 
imagine, but a freed and a freeing activity, that 
was as real and as far-reaching as the life of Rome. 
And of course there was a remarkable fitness in 
the revelation of this saving activity coming to the 
Roman world through a Jew. The Jewish people 
throughout their history were a people of captivi- 
ties. Over and over again they had lived through 
just the experience which Roman arms at last 



The Death of Socrates, 61 



brought to the Mediterranean life. They had 
been Evolved so; that is, by ever being involved. 
What more natural than that the great teacher 
for all the captive peoples of the conquering 
empire should appear at Jerusalem? Not only, 
did the conditions of history require his birth, but 
also they required his birth there ; and, lest I be 
seriously misunderstood, when I say that history 
required it there, let me add that no such thing as 
determinism is for a moment intended, but this, 
namely, that in that history, as in all history, we 
find what man was, and so what his very selfhood, 
his own self-being, required. That were strange 
history, indeed, which told us what man had to be 
wholly in spite of himself, as if human action in 
response to conditions were possible without the 
equally real existing human motive. 

It will complete the story of these chapters if we 
bring to mind the twofold way in which Rome 
herself came to receive the Christian revelation. 
To Rome, — and what else could we expect, 
knowing the central part that political Rome 
played in this development? — to Rome, as 
already hinted, the gospel of incarnation meant 
something temporal as well as something spirit- 
ual: it meant a Pope, with claims to temporal 
power, as well as a Christ; or a Eope in whom 
Emperor and Christ should be one. If Christian- 



62 Citizenship and Salvation. 

ity through captive Judea said to Greece, and 
to the other conquered peoples that even in the 
captivity was supreme opportunity, that such self- 
denial was through an already accomplished self- 
expression, to successful Rome she said — for on 
no other terms could Rome have accepted her 
teaching — that in the Emperor dwelt also the 
Christ, God's representative on earth. 

But we have, or probably seem to have, wan- 
dered far from our subject, " The Death of Socra- 
tes." Yet from what the death of Socrates came 
finally to mean to us we have not wandered at 
all, — unless any conclusion may be said to be a 
departure from its premises. We have only left 
our premises in order, as we close, to dwell, rather 
too briefly than at too great length or with too 
much digression, upon this conclusion. The death 
of Socrates, then, with its fulfilment in the fall of 
Greece, was the birth of Christ with its fulfilment 
in the freedom of Rome, at once a temporal and 
a spiritual power. So did history forestall St. 
Augustine in proving God. And, finally, Socra- 
tes' " I know that I do not know," with all the 
incidents of thought and life that we have seen to 
belong to it, turned, by the force of its own logic, 
through the liberation of its own deeper motive, 
into Dens est God is alive on earth. 



fart II. 

THE DEATH OF CHRIST. 



W 



CHAPTER I. 

JUDEA. 
I. 

E have now seen the closest connection 
between the death of Socrates and the 
birth of Christ. We have found that the lives of 
the two men were vital incidents in the unfolding 
of human experience. In the wonderful logic of 
history they appeared to us inseparable. Thus 
the death of Socrates was the birth of Christ. In 
their different ways, too, — Socrates in the way 
already disclosed to us, and Christ in a way hardly 
unseen before but now to be made clear, — they 
were witnesses to will and motive and individual 
responsibility in history. If Socrates, himself a 
Greek, forestalled Rome in the conquest of Greece, 
Christ, as much Roman as Jew, by his life and 
death overcame Rome, and won for himself the 
right to be called the prophet of modern life. 



64 Citizenship and Salvation. 

In the study of Socrates we had only the ordi- 
nary difficulties of all study, but here in the study 
before us, although we have been led to it so nat- 
urally, a difficulty confronts us that we felt only 
distantly, if at all, before. To most, if not to all, 
Socrates has never been more than a figure in 
ancient history, interesting perhaps to the scholar, 
but hardly vitally important to the man. Christ, 
however, lives to-day, and is close to the hearts of 
millions of people, and his being so real and so 
near makes the study of him, the quiet scrutiny of 
his life and death, not only hard but also in the 
thought of many unnecessary and undesirable. 
So many whose feelings one wants to respect, 
think that what one is justified in saying of him 
has been wholly determined beforehand. They 
even expect the use of certain conventional phrases, 
— a Christian emotion rather than a Christian un- 
derstanding being the only aim that they can give 
countenance to. 

But no one will deny that it is always the truth 
that sets men free. Indeed, I find myself only 
repeating here what was said before. Cherished 
ideals have nothing to fear from the study of life's 
deepest concerns. Rather they have everything 
to gain. Accordingly, whatever is real and abid- 
ing in the relation of Christ to man will only be 
brought nearer to completion and realization by 



The Death of Christ. 65 

a clear knowledge of it, reached through inde- 
pendent study. In fact, one has to think but little 
to lose one's sympathy with those who are so 
short-sighted as to determine beforehand what 
they will admit to their thinking and as to dis- 
courage or possibly to resent the more candid 
thinking of others ; and for my own part also the 
very position of such over-cautious people makes 
an undertaking like the present seem only just so 
much the more worth while. Still I would make 
my study, however independent, however critical, 
so simple and so direct that my present defence 
of it will be justified, and the work itself, seem at its 
close, not an attack at all, but an interpretation. 

We have found that Christ was more than an 
idea. He was a motive, a principle of salvation, 
which the rise of Roman supremacy set free in 
humanity. That motive, however, we saw, not 
from the standpoint of the life that gave its name, 
but from that of a life rather pagan than Christian ; 
and while the motive itself must be deeper than 
any distinction between paganism and Christianity, 
yet the fullest appreciation requires a view of it in 
its Jewish as well as in its Greek setting. Indeed, 
only as we get an idea of the life and character of 
the Jews can we understand how in Christ the 
motive was so much more fully expressed and 
human nature so much more clearly defined, and 

5 



66 Citizenship and Salvation. 

how Christ's conquest was so much wider than 
Socrates', being as much of the Romans as of his 
own people. We must fully understand Christ 
the Jew before we can understand Christ the mo- 
tive or saving principle. We must understand the 
life at Jerusalem before we can understand the life 
in the hearts of men from the days of Christ's 
coming to the present time. 

Christ's conquest was double; as just now said, 
it was of Romans as well as of Jews. Of its 
double character we had a hint before. Thus you 
remember how the selfhood of Christ passed in 
men's thoughts from the Jewish Messiah to the 
life and heart of Rome. St. Paul, in his Epistle 
to the Romans, saw Christ as the law which a man 
is unto himself, or as one in whom all, being 
many, are yet " one body," being " every one 
members one of another ; " and, as we saw, the self- 
hood of Christ came even to be identified with the 
Roman Emperor. But, after such identification, 
how was it possible that Rome should not repeat 
in her imperial career the sacrifice at Jerusalem, 
even as Greece had repeated the sacrifice at 
Athens? The death of Socrates and the fall of 
Greece were one; and so, too, the death of Christ 
and the fall of Rome ; and if in the former was the 
birth of imperialism, in the latter, as we shall find 
when we have followed it out to its fullest mean- 



The Death of Christ. 67 

ing, was the birth of whatever is deepest and 
most real in life to-day. 

So in the pages that are still before us our 
interest is, first, in the death of Christ at Jerusa- 
lem ; secondly, in Rome's repetition of it; and, 
finally, in whatever Rome's downfall realized for 
both the national and the individual life of our 
own times. 



II. 

In the history of civilization it was the peculiar 
part of Christ's people, the Jews, to take captivity 
captive. Their history, a long record of captivi- 
ties, prepared them for such a part, and mankind 
naturally looked to them for help when captivity 
and empire became general over the earth. But 
what we have to notice is that the Jews took cap- 
tivity captive, not only in the way of Christ, as 
everywhere recognized, but also in another way, 
a peculiarly worldly way, that has not been gen- 
erally recognized. We have been too ready to 
forget that Christ himself was a Jew, and that 
therefore, however great, however spiritual his 
achievement, the Jewish people, even in their 
opposition to him, must have shared in it. 

Yes, the Jews did, albeit in a way quite their 
own, what Christ did; they, as well as he, over- 



68 Citizenship and Salvation. 

came Rome, and at the very height of her im- 
perial glory. What their own way was we shall 
see, in course of time, and we shall find, too, 
that it has been as much a part of the progress of 
civilization as Christ's way; but, for the present, 
I wish to dwell on the bare fact, which I now 
express in these words, that, in so far as Christ 
was a Jew, the Jews themselves must have been 
Christians, — Christians, perhaps, in spite of them- 
selves, but still Christians. At the Crucifixion, 
indeed, when on the little hill west of Jerusalem, 
alike in the self-sacrificing prophet and in the 
sacrificing people, the Jewish nature found its 
culminating expression, the exchange of characters 
was complete. At the Crucifixion the Jew died; 
the Christian survived. 

Does this sound strange? To some, no doubt, 
it is even harsh. But the relation of a great 
leader to his people can hardly be anything else 
than this of exchange of characters. Socrates 
exemplified it; and the fact is that I should hardly 
have resorted to so great a paradox, if our Greek 
studies had not already prepared us for it. Those 
studies gave us, as a tool for use in the interpreta- 
tion of history, the principle of the identity, or at 
least of the symmetry, of opposites. Thus, in 
what sense the misers and the spendthrift-reformer 
at Athens, or after them the would-be pleasure-seek- 



The Death of Christ. 69 



ers and Plato with his Utopian ideas, or finally the 
Greeks as Macedonian subjects and Aristotle with 
his world-reason, were contemporaries by nature, 
being in sympathy even in spite of themselves, we 
know through this principle. They were natural 
contemporaries, in that in spite of their opposition 
or rather because of it they contained, each oppo- 
site side in itself, the same contradiction, being 
symmetrical expressions of that contradiction, 
being each rather in conflict with itself than with 
its opponent, and expressing in one or another of 
the different stages the Greek's long conflict with 
himself. The opposing sides seemed so truly to 
co-operate in freeing the national motive that we 
might almost have spoken of the Greek race as 
seizing upon its trouble and working out its salva- 
tion with its two hands. But, the action and 
achievement of the Greeks aside, the same co- 
operation of symmetrical opposites was in the 
character and activity of Christ the crucified and 
of the Jews his crucifiers. 

And what is opposition but a process in which 
opponents mediate each other's activities? Did 
contestants ever fail in their struggle to change 
sides ? Shakespeare, in his " Merchant of Venice,"' 
has given a suggestion of what opposition and 
conflict involve. He, indeed, sets Christian against 
Jew; but, before the play is ended, remembering 



70 Citizenship and Salvation, 

the standards of the time, one has in Portia the 
better Jew, and in submissive Shylock the more 
perfect Christian. Simply, Shylock is out-Jewed ; 
Portia is out-Christianed. So I say, again, that at 
the Crucifixion, in a very real sense, the Jews and 
Christ changed sides, or came each to express the 
nature of the other. The Jews in their way and 
Christ in his way took captivity captive. 

Quantum sufficit. You bid me now explain. 
Just in what way did the Jewish people overcome 
Rome? 



III. 

Well, the Jew is probably more widely known 
than any other national type. Very significantly 
he has spread over the world, either in person or 
in character and social function, as rapidly and as 
widely as Christianity. He has been generally 
despised ; but certainly, whatever the feeling about 
him, birth made him what he was, and Christianity 
has contributed largely towards making him what 
he is, and at most he can be but an intensification 
of something real in the character of us all. In- 
deed, to revert to the paradox, when one thinks a 
little, how is it possible, with Christ himself a Jew, 
that all who call themselves Christians should not 
in some way be Jews also ? 



The Death of Christ. 71 

Traditionalism and a disposition to a somewhat 
peculiar form of idolatry are the Jew's original 
marks, and in view of his long life of wandering 
and dependence neither is to be wondered at. 
The nomadic life, the years in the desert, the sub- 
mission to Egypt and Syria and Babylon, to Per- 
sia and Macedonia, and finally to Rome, made him 
treasure his past, its traditions and such outer 
emblems of it as he could carry with him, as no 
other has ever done ; and he came, ever more and 
more, because so much in his life was determined 
for him, because he was so much more involved 
than evolved, to think of the authority of his own 
ideals and emblems as quite external to him. In 
short, -his past became an idol, and what could 
have been more natural? It became an idol, too, 
not one whit less exacting than the alien kings and 
princes that ruled over him, so that in worshipping 
it he did but make a captive of his captive self, 
identifying his opportunity of self-expression with 
his necessity. 

Now, between the Jewish worshipper of the past 
and the Greek miser or hoarder of it there was a 
most important difference. The Jew clung to 
relics; the Greek erected monuments. The Jew 
regarded the records and emblems of his life as 
possessing an intrinsic worth ; the Greek found 
worth only where his senses were stimulated. 



72 Citizenship and Salvation. 

For the Jew the past was a sacred inheritance to 
be kept ; for the Greek it was a feeling to be 
revived. The difference between the symbolic 
and the artistic or between the formal and the 
pleasing, or, if regard is had to their effects on 
national character, between a country of plains and 
deserts and a country of mountain barriers and 
islands, was the difference between Jew and Greek. 
Furthermore, although political supremacy was 
denied the Jew, his national spirit, refusing to be 
crushed, found satisfaction in a theocracy. Indeed, 
to be subject to alien rulers, to be idolatrous of the 
past, and to be chosen of God were inseparable 
conditions of the Jew's life. In priests and proph- 
ets he found a substitute for what in the way of 
political control the monarchs of the East never 
allowed him. In faith and insight and revelation, 
in signs and miracles, he found a substitute for the 
reason that so signally characterized the Greek. 
And can it be that the sole difference between 
faith and reason, or between theocracy and 
autonomy, is a matter merely of length of time, or 
of frequency in a given time, in which an experi- 
ence comes? Surely our thinking here has sug- 
gested some such conclusion. The following 
formula, as almost mathematically true, has been 
urging itself upon us for expression and reflection: 
In as many centuries as the Greeks were occupied 



The Death of Christ 73 

in their conquest of themselves, for so many times 
did the children of Israel live through the same 
tragic experience. For the Jews, especially in 
their political life, a thousand years were as one 
day, and one day as a thousand years. 

So, very briefly, we find the Jews, — unlike the 
Greeks, but unlike because the same life and 
character so often repeated, so much intensified ; 
idolaters, not misers; believers, not thinkers; 
guardians of an idea, not long struggling and far- 
seeking discoverers of it; God's chosen people; 
and in history, in their special way, conquerors, 
not mere subjects of Rome. 



IV. , 

In Christ's time the Jews had brought their 
idolatry of the past to the point of a perfect para- 
dox, that is to say, to the moment of precipitation. 
Throughout their history they had not only wor- 
shipped the past, but also dreamt of a Messiah ; and 
obviously the worship and the dream were insepa- 
rable attitudes of mind. But at the time of 
Christ's coming the past had ceased to be the 
object of reverence that it had been, and in conse- 
quence the dream of the future had also lost its 
hold. The temple had become a place for money- 
changers, and worship was rather a form than a 



74 Citizenship and Salvation. 

spiritual emotion. The paradox, then, was this. 
The traditionalism and the idolatry, of course of 
their own weight or from their own nature, had 
changed to sheer formalism, which is always so 
much more than it seems. To use the metaphor 
again, formalism brings precipitation. Formalism 
is the past coming into actual use. It is at once 
acting in the future and looking at the past, or a 
sort of advancing backward. It is a seizing op- 
portunity and pretending pious duty or necessity. 
It is practice wholly out of accord with teaching. 
And when such a contradiction is reached in a 
people's development or conflict with itself, a birth 
is at hand. 

The past become formal, what else can it mean 
but the future become real and living, free and 
active, in the present; and the future, free and 
living, what but birth and individuation? Such 
necessity of birth and individuation we have seen 
at Athens ; now we see it again at Jerusalem. As 
at Athens, moreover, so at Jerusalem ; as the re- 
former to the misers, so the Messiah to the idol- 
aters ; the Messiah, like the reformer, was himself 
under the spell of the contradiction that gave him 
birth. Thus, just such a separation or abstraction 
as his people made of the past he made of the 
future. He and they were opposites, but sym- 
metrical opposites. He was under the spell of 



The Death of Christ. 75 

the contradiction that bound them, and to the con- 
tradiction his death, viewed as his own act or as 
his people's, was due. 

Thus, in order that what we have here may 
arrange and define itself in our thought, I say, with 
little more than repetition, that the Jewish idol- 
aters had come to insist upon retaining for life at 
Jerusalem a content that was no longer real or no 
longer vitally stimulating, — hence their formalism; 
and that the Messiah undertook to express in life 
an as yet unrealized ideal ; hence his character as 
Messenger from another World ; and, finally, that, 
just because their traditionalism and his idealism 
were both under the spell of essentially the same 
contradiction, or were aspects of one activity of a 
people's life, or were each only a counter-manifesta- 
tion and so a deeper manifestation of the other, 
and because the continued expression of the activ- 
ity had ever to deepen or intensify each of its 
aspects, — for just these reasons were the cruci- 
fixion and the self-sacrifice, as the two sides of the 
culminating expression of the Jewish character, 
necessary in history. Only so could the ideal be 
realized ; only so could the national motive be set 
finally free. From one side, that of the people, the 
past, from the other, that of Christ, the future, was 
brought into adjustment with the present. As in all 
adjustment, as at the moment of realization of any 



j6 Citizenship and Salvation. 

ideal, the future died that the past might fulfil it- 
self in the present. 

It would hardly do, as you must see, to recount 
the Jew's struggle with himself as resulting from a 
confusion of means and end. The terms means 
and end, as commonly used, were well fitted to the 
Greeks ; but the Jews were not artisans nor fight- 
ers nor great leaders, their activity being of a less 
worldly sort. More direct than means and end 
are the terms suggested, past and future, or, to give 
still others, letter and spirit. These show the con- 
flict of just such a people as we have seen the 
Jews to be, of a people that had lived and moved 
and had its being within an activity quite inclusive 
of its own. Means and end, moreover, are the 
concern of reason ; letter and spirit, or past and 
future, of faith; and the Jews were a people of 
faith. Thus, if in still another way the Jews may 
be distinguished from the Greeks, we find at Jeru- 
salem, instead of a time-serving knowledge, instead 
of individual man as the measure of all things, a 
belief no deeper than words and ceremonies, and 
instead of an intellectual awakening through a 
knowledge of ignorance, a spiritual revival through 
a conviction of personal insufficiency, that is to 
say, instead of " I know that I do not know," " I 
believe, help thou mine unbelief." Not against 
subjectivism and utilitarianism and pleasure-seek- 



The Death of Christ. j'j 

ing did Christ set himself, but against such vain 
conceits as an empty faith and a hollow spiritual 
life. 



Now at the Crucifixion the Jew's formalism, with 
its empty faith and hollow spiritual life, came into 
use; it came into use completely, explicitly. So 
to speak, with the special view of life, the char- 
acter and the history that it implied, it became a 
finished and actually useful tool; it became an 
instrumental formalism, that is, something more 
than a mere state of mind, say an attitude of de- 
fined self-expression or a basis of positive action. 
In fact, the Crucifixion did nothing more nor less 
than give the Jew a trade or profession, of whose 
activity it was itself typical. For consider — 

I have described the Jew's formalism as at once 
acting in the future and looking at the past or as a 
sort of walking backwards, and I have shown how 
the birth of Christ was involved in it. But at his 
death Christ made fully manifest the nature of 
formalism ; he revealed the future as its ideal or 
motive ; and he made his people, even in their 
opposition to him, adopt his Christian standpoint. 
He made them face about. He gave them a 
future. He defined their formalism by giving it 



78 Citizenship and Salvation, 

an end, sacrificing himself to it that they might be 
set free. 

They had been idolaters of the past and had 
become formalists, but at the Crucifixion they were 
brought to the point of affirming that the future 
was their motive with exactly the same emphasis 
that Christ himself used. In treating him as an 
impostor they had no choice but to become loyal 
at least to the principle for which he stood. If he 
was not their Messiah, then the Messiah was still 
to come ; and upon their return to this forgotten 
and all but lifeless faith the formalism that had 
been developed among them became instrumental, 
and they came into a trade or profession. They 
were transformed, as if by magic, from idolaters 
and traditionalists into lenders. The Crucifixion 
itself was an act of lending. 

Of course a state of mind, as it becomes defined, 
must always imply the development of some ma- 
terial interest, the setting in of some specially 
chosen social function. In other words, when 
it becomes a basis of positive action, when it be- 
comes instrumental, it assumes of necessity some 
material expression. The Jewish formalism, chang- 
ing in the way that we have seen, illustrates this. 
Being, as regards its verbal formulae and its outer 
ceremonial, an altogether abstract basis of social 
intercourse, an wholly external medium of ex- 



The Death of Christ. 79 



change, it created a mental attitude that was pre- 
paratory to admitting, as if at the back door, — a 
phrase confessedly more expressive than elegant, 

a very worldly activity. Worldly activities 

often, if not always, enter in some such way; men 
choose to let them in so ; and, in the case of the 
Jews, upon their growth into instrumental formal- 
ism their lending became money-lending. Obvi- 
ously, money is but a material basis of formalism 
as medium of exchange or as liberated for the 
actual use of the world. 1 

Money, as a commodity abstracted and assigned 
an wholly intrinsic worth, is the past treasured 
solely for itself, and so embodied in a medium 
wholly external to its possessor ; it is the past as 
so much coin or value for the present ; it is that 
in which all developed wants and relations are 
become one and abstract, or that in which hunger 
and thirst and avarice of all kinds and desire of 
travel and longing for all sorts of opportunities 
have a common object; in a word, it is a material 
counterpart of the unity of the self or of a com- 
mon or universal self in society. In money are we 

1 It is important to remember here that the Jews were natu- 
rally given to agriculture. They were not, naturally, before 
Christ's time, commercially disposed. Witness their laws against 
putting monej on interest. See Lev. xxv. 36, 37, and Deut. xxm. 
20 ; also an article in the " International Journal of Ethics, " 
"The Jewish Question," by Morris Jastrow, Jr., July, 1896. 



80 Citizenship and Salvation. 

all one. On earth in money, as hereafter in the 
Christian's Heaven, are we all one. 1 

And so, at last, in the Jews becoming by nature 
money-lenders we have the special way, the worldly 
way, in which they adopted Christianity, or in 
which they, like Christ himself, overcame Rome 
or took captivity captive. For, as just now indi- 
cated, money is a worldly counterpart of Heaven. 
Money-lending, too, demands a loyalty to what is 
regarded, even in our own times, as the distinctly 
Christian attitude of mind. Thus it relies, does it 
not? on an unseen future, on faith, on self-denial, 
on world-credit; and, strangely enough, so do the 
extremes meet, it is really an " unworldly " activity, 

1 And here, but in a note, I am tempted to a slight digression. 
There are two opposite theories in ethics, corresponding to the 
two sides of Christianity just indicated above, — to the money or 
Jew side and to the Heaven or Christ side. These two theories 
are hedonism and abstract or intuitional or indeterministic ideal- 
ism. The former makes pleasure, the latter makes duty the nat- 
ural motive of conduct. But pleasure as motive or ideal is a 
complete abstraction for the past as having value to the present, 
and duty is a complete abstraction for the future. Since, how- 
ever, money is a perfect abstraction of the past, the thoroughly 
consistent hedonist should be a money-seeker, while the consist- 
ent idealist should be on his side a money-lender. Accordingly 
the two theories complement each other, and in banking are to 
be seen in co-operation, where money is lent for itself, and in the 
Christian Heaven, where duty is also pleasure. And, finally, 
St. Paul's message to the Athenians of a God worshipped in 
ignorance meant one thing to the pleasure-worshippers, making 
them the hirelings of Rome, and another to the opposing Plato- 
nists, making them believers in the Kingdom of Heaven. 



The Death of Christ 81 

a sort of unworldliness in the world itself, an ab- 
stracting of the world's business, or a worldly life 
that is quite apart from man's ordinary labors as 
productive and directly useful. In history, more- 
over, there have been two characters that have 
been conspicuous from the first for their ever- 
increasing independence of imperial Rome, — the 
Christian believer, namely, and the money-lender. 
And I must add, in order to keep our ideas well 
together, that trading money for itself or lending 
it, money being what we have seen it to be, was 
the natural fulfilment of the motive which the long 
captivity of the Jews, the traditionalism and the 
theocracy, had nurtured. In money-lending the 
confusion of future with past found expression, 
and a national life, so long isolated, so long de- 
prived of participation in distinctly worldly affairs, 
was set free, the people turning their necessity 
into opportunity. In money-lending theocracy 
was brought down to earth and shown to be ex- 
pressive of an accomplished adjustment to secular 
life. I know well that to have been the chosen 
people of God and to have become dealers in 
money will seem to such as think only of the 
words or as get no farther than that " love of 
money is the root of all evil" an historical ab- 
surdity, and for the Jews wholly damnatory, but 
in reality it was, historically and psychologically, 

6 



82 Citizenship and Salvation, 

a necessity. Love of money may be " the root of 
all evil," but assuredly it is also a basis of most 
Christian possibilities ; it is an indispensable con- 
dition of the evolution of a Christian society. The 
step from theocracy to banking was a very short 
one, as short as that from spirit to matter. The 
parable of the talents was peculiarly suited to the 
life and character of the Jews. 1 

Yes, at the Crucifixion, in their special way, a 
very worldly way, the Jews became Christians. 
In a way quite their own they were conquerors of 
Rome. The other world, with which they met 
the earthly claims of Rome, was indeed, in spite 
of the otherness, altogether worldly, but it dealt 
an effective blow. And theirs was, it is true, a 
Christianity only by a sort of analogy, say a 
physical or a " negative " Christianity or a Chris- 
tianity rather in fact than in ideal, rather in in- 

1 And here a note. Somebody will doubtless remind me that 
I am in an important respect doing violence to history. Not so. 
My meaning is not that the Jews invented banking. Such an 
idea would be absurd. Nothing was ever invented. Babylon 
and Greece and early Rome had bankers, although treasure- 
keeping rather than banking appears to be the truer account of 
their business. The Jews invented banking no more than Christ 
invented Christianity. They only freed the principle to the world. 
Just as Socrates made the old-time militarism imperial and as 
Christ made the pre-Christian Christianity international, so the 
Jew made banking world-wide, and is, therefore, if any one 
would distinguish him, rather its presiding genius than its sole 
agent or creator. 



The Death of Christ &$ 

stinct or force than in will ; but its importance to 
human life and progressive civilization can hardly 
be overestimated. 



VI. 

Are you now impatient with me for giving so 
much time to money and banking and so little time 
to Christ and the spiritual beauty and grandeur of 
his life and character? Do I seem trivial or even 
irreverent in the way in which I would interpret 
the great tragedy at Jerusalem? Yet, in answer, 
my feeling most certainly is not irreverent. As 
keenly as any one I appreciate all that was done 
for humanity at Christ's death ; as fondly as any 
one I cherish all that was achieved by him for 
what we value most in life to-day. But, as you 
must see, I ever have to remember what in time 
past we have been disposed to forget and what 
accordingly we have failed properly to measure : 
I remember that Christ was a Jew; and, just 
because he was a Jew, I am constrained to think 
that the Jews as a nation shared in his achieve- 
ment, as in general I have to think that for every 
spiritual advance in man's unfolding there must 
come also a material change, co-operating with it, 
not opposing it, as any instrument co-operates even 
with a complaining workman. As said already, 



84 Citizenship and Salvation. 

money and banking, so natural to the Jewish 
character, have been, beyond all question, a ma- 
terial basis of Christian possibility. Even as 
Socrates, albeit against their will, drew his people 
unto himself, turning them from misers into pleas- 
ure-seekers and finally into selves as means in the 
use of pagan military Rome, so Christ, born of 
the life and longing of the Jews, drew the Jews 
unto himself, transforming the resentful idolaters 
into lenders of their abstracted and materialized 
past, and finally into bankers for the use of 
Christendom. 

And it is certainly no objection to the position 
that I take here, that the Jews have been anti- 
Christian. It is, on the contrary, corroboration. 
Keep in mind that our present interest goes deeper 
than any mere opposition. If the Jews have been 
anti-Christian, in the last analysis it can be only 
because Christians themselves have been so too, 
thereby inviting the opposition. Even as Christ 
was a Jew, so have his followers been Jews also, 
and had the same struggle to pass through. Who 
hates the Jews should remember that it is always 
suicide to hate too strongly. 

But my meaning will be finally clear, if I sug- 
gest in a paragraph or two in what ways Christians 
have shown themselves of a more or less Jewish 
character. And, to begin with, being Jewish is 



The Death of Christ. 85 

not in money-lending alone. What I have called 
instrumental formalism, essential to lending, is not 
confined to operations in money. Instrumental 
formalism is one and the same thing with a selfish 
sympathy, that is, a sympathy exercised only as 
a tool of individual self-interest; and wherever a 
selfish sympathy manifests itself, there is the 
Jew's lending with the abstraction of the future 
as motive. Or, conversely, living, not for, but in 
the future, as many seem to do, has the most 
natural effect of weakening responsibility to life 
and conditions as they are, and so of making 
possible, if not even of stimulating, a wholly 
selfish use of the present. Thus, Christians so 
often doing little more than dreaming of heaven 
have again and again trifled with their earthly 
responsibilities. They have stopped at sentimen- 
tal charity, which is a crude selfishness. They 
have co-operated with institutions, notably political 
institutions, known to be corrupt. They have 
accepted for their work dishonestly won money. 
They have lost themselves in mere Sunday obser- 
vance, in devotion to creeds and rituals. And in 
all these things that they have done who cannot 
see the selfish sympathy, the lender's interest, 
the Jew's instrumental formalism? 

But, to show the same thing from still another 
side, I have heard it said by foreigners, that in this 



86 Citizeitskip and Salvation. 

country the people are peculiarly dishonest, — that 
in politics, in education, in religion, we are most 
flagrant conventionalists ; and although we are 
not the only people in Christendom upon whom 
this charge of conventionalism might be put, I 
think we can hardly complain of injustice when it 
is cast at us. Certainly it is dishonest for teachers 
and for preachers, as well as for politicians, to 
turn their backs on new truth, to temporize with 
new points of view, to know no future but the 
hereafter, in short, to be and to do a hundred and 
one things for the sake merely of present position 
and "influence" or from fear of stirring life too 
deeply. It is dishonest, and it shows the Jew 
cropping out. It is a cowardly abstraction of the 
future in order to avoid the incommodities of 
change in the present. It is mere banking, always 
bent on keeping things as they are, and so on 
giving to what is past an intrinsic value. 

So are Christians in reality their own despised 
Jews, and the struggle of a Christian society is 
Christ's struggle. Christians have to struggle only 
with the Judaism in themselves. Witness the his- 
tory of Christendom from its beginning to the 
present time. 



The Death of Christ 87 



VII. 

But now, in summary, at the Crucifixion Christ 
in his way and his people in their way overcame 
Judaism. They overcame 1 Judaism, on the one 
hand, by bringing the future into the present, and, 
on the other hand, by bringing the past into the 
present. They made an abstract idealism actual 
and dynamic and a formal traditionalism instru- 
mental. As was said, at the Crucifixion the Jew 
died, the Christian survived. 

The Christian, however, survived as a subject of 
Rome. Still he was not a Roman, since both as 
Jewish money-lender and as Christian worshipper 
he was independent of Rome. His money and 
his Heaven were both superior to the restraints of 
pagan military Rome ; and this superiority, as we 
know, Rome was very prompt to recognize, for 
the selfhood of Christ passed into her Imperator; 
whence Rome came to repeat in history the strug- 
gle and the sacrifice at Jerusalem. 

But of Rome and her decline I shall speak in 
the following chapter. Let us take ship, then, as 
Paul did, and cross from Palestine, past the islands 
and peninsulas of Greece, to Italy and Rome. 

1 Or, as the same thing, fulfilled Judaism. 



88 Citizenship and Salvation. 



CHAPTER II. 

ROME FALLS. 
I. 

ROME was a development, and she must illus- 
trate a typical process; and just what the 
typical process is we ought to be able to deter- 
mine from what we have seen of her dependence 
on Greece and Judea. 

But this dependence suggests that the process 
of development is only the past getting into use, 
that is, becoming a perfected mechanism or tool 
for a revolutionary and evolutionary activity of the 
present. The Greek character and the Jewish 
character getting into use made Rome. Not that 
in these we have the only factors that entered into 
Roman life, but that they were certainly the most 
conspicuous factors, and afford an explanation of 
the fall as well as of the rise of the empire. 

It is rather the common or conventional thing 
to say that Rome's rule was one of force, that her 
time was one when might alone made right or 
when physical forces were supreme, but to any 



The Death of Christ 89 

such view we have to be altogether hostile. A 
time when might makes right is a time when a 
developed motive is at last free, or when an accom- 
plished ideal is in full control, or when, to recall 
from above, the past is fully in use. Thus might 
made right, physical forces were operating, not 
less when you or I last took a walk to the post- 
office than when Rome's strength went abroad 
conquering the world. Because Socrates and 
Christ, in their different ways forestalled Rome, 
Socrates forestalling her rise and Christ forestall- 
ing her fall, Rome herself, only repeating their 
achievements, was as much will as force, right as 
might, opportunity as necessity, spirit as matter. 

Socrates and Christ, furthermore, as men who 
liberated the past and thereby effected the free 
application of natural force and even in their indi- 
vidual lives anticipated great social movements, 
show just what genius is, and, as geniuses, they 
were related to the two chief incidents of Rome's 
activity, her rise and her fall. The one antece- 
dently sanctioned, the other subsequently inter- 
preted, Rome's imperialism. Of course sanction 
and interpretation are the two chief incidents of 
all activity; but it is not always recognized that 
decline and fall necessarily follow or even accom- 
pany interpretation. 

Now, as to the first incident, the sanction, I 



90 Citizenship and Salvation. 

must here repeat a little from the chapters on 
Socrates. The antecedent conditions of Rome's 
imperial freedom were self-denial, and, as really 
only the other side of self-denial, a sense of uni- 
versal selfhood. These, however, Socrates real- 
ized at his death, and through Stoicism, Epicure- 
anism, and Scepticism they became real to all. 
Socrates' universal selfhood, moreover, was ex- 
tremely abstract. It was the one ; it was simply 
not any individual. But from the standpoint of 
such an abstraction and such a negation, we can 
see, as indeed we did see, how the imperial mili- 
tarism arose. The individual, through self-denial 
made means or " measure " or brought into definite 
status, became at once an integral part of a politi- 
cal mechanism ; and just in proportion as the ne- 
gation, or the denial, was complete and as the 
scepticism was thoroughgoing, the mechanism 
was free to move. Indeed, from the standpoint of 
the parts, what better account could be given of a 
moving mechanism than that just suggested, action 
through self-denial and abstract unity of selves? 
Each part can be imagined to say, " I am not, 
because we are all one and equal." Certainly 
Socrates said that, and so sanctioned Rome. 

But, furthermore, as to the other incident of 
activity, namely, the interpretation, this is first to 
be observed. The movement of a mechanism, 



The Death of Christ 9 1 



particularly when its parts are sentient beings, when 
it is a social mechanism, — and I confess to won- 
dering if any other kind of mechanism ever really 
moved, — is sure to start disintegration. The mo- 
tion has the very natural effect of communicating 
to every part the selfhood, that is, the nature and 
motive and responsibility, of the whole, so that 
after motion has taken place every single part, 
from its own essentially different and peculiar 
standpoint, will feel, if it does not say, " I did it ; 
mine was the action, mine the achievement." 
After the motion, in other words, will come in- 
dividuality and competition. Thus before a battle 
what a mechanism an army is ; afterwards, what a 
lot of ambitious individuals, each clamoring for 
special recognition, each imagining himself the 
ao-ent of the whole ! Yes, a sentient mechanism 
is a whole which upon action breaks into a group 
of microcosmic reproductions of itself; it is a 
whole whose self-expression produces a commu- 
nity of different selves, each and all acting in and 
with the original motive or ideal, but seeking at 
the same time individual independence, — in short, 
it is no sooner an acting moving mechanism than 
it becomes an organism. 

Militarism, accordingly, brings into being, or 
rather reveals and makes ideal, social organism; 
and with the change the individual finds that his 



92 Citizenship and Salvation. 

self-denial was self-expression, and that his unity 
with his fellows was really an organic unity. So, 
however true it be that Rome was not built in a 
day, it is equally true that she lived only for a day. 
Upon self-expression she outgrew herself; her 
division followed in the wake of her unification. 

Hence in organism the movement of mechanism, 
that is, the activity of Rome, is interpreted. In it 
the conditions of militarism are made ideal, be- 
coming only the recognized means to an already 
realized end or active motive. In the nature of 
organism, however, as he who runs may read, are 
the primal teachings of Christ, and in its activity 
are to be seen, free and living, the very forces or 
principles that Christ and his people liberated. 
Therefore, as was said, the activity that Socrates 
sanctioned, was subsequently interpreted by Christ. 

II. 

Can there be found a more concise account of 
Christianity in its fulness than that in the simple 
word " organism " ? In our day, certainly, no word is 
so rich in meaning, so truly the key of our modern 
life and thought. For what is truer of organism 
than that self-denial of the individual part is self- 
expression? Or what, than that reason ever be- 
longs to the whole? Or, again, what than that 



The Death of Christ, 93 



responsibility is social? In responsibility as social, 
in this alone, lies all that is vital in the doctrines of 
incarnation, sacrifice, and resurrection. Organism, 
in fine, is the Christ-motive, — for that is what I 
like to call it, — which was liberated at the Cru- 
cifixion and which has survived on earth quite as 
truly as it has been said to have returned to 
Heaven. The course of history shows this. 

Thus the course of history shows the decline of 
Roman imperialism before those two essentially 
Christian or Jewish principles, belief in a hereafter 
and interest in money here. Through the working 
of those principles organism, which was born at 
Christ's death or realized upon Rome's self-expres- 
sion, has gradually thrown off its integument of 
mechanism. 

And I feel now as if I hardly needed to enlarge 
upon the foregoing. I seem to myself to be get- 
ting dangerously near to the commonplace. Illus- 
tration, however, can do no harm, and even the 
commonplace is constantly getting a new mean- 
ing. So I may remind you, in the first place, that 
belief in an hereafter is evidence of organism suc- 
ceeding mechanism, of social organism succeeding 
militarism, because it removes the basis of equality 
or unity among men wholly away from the life of 
worldly relations and places it in an wholly un- 
worldly sphere. Socrates had taught an hereafter 



94 Citizenship and Salvation, 

only negatively. Final reality, he had said, is not 
here and now; it is not ours; whither death leads 
no one knows, — perhaps to dreamless sleep, per- 
haps to some other world, where, as men say, all the 
dead abide; but Christ confidently taught, " In 
my father's house are many mansions." The dif- 
ference is striking, and it is the difference between 
mechanism and organism in the life of men on 
earth. Does not heaven as an accomplished be- 
lief show the individual insisting upon some return 
for his services, upon some reward for his self- 
denial? Does it not show him claiming recogni- 
tion of his own intrinsic worth, or asserting that 
within his own particular experience and as a part 
of his own deeper motive the life to which he be- 
longs has justification, — that he is no slavish sub- 
ject, but a responsible agent of that life? Belief in 
an hereafter saves the individual to himself at the 
same time that it relates him to all his fellows. 
True, he may need centuries in which to accom- 
plish a freedom from all his chains, but with the 
belief his liberation begins. 

But, in the second place, belief in an hereafter 
has had its counterpart, its earthly representative, 
in the interest in money here. Property as me- 
dium of exchange, abstract property, or money as 
coin, we found to be the unworldly in the world, it 
was Heaven's left hand ; and quite as obviously as 



The Death of Christ. 95 

the hereafter it shows the assertion of individuality 
that the evolution of organism out of mechanism 
brought about. As medium of exchange money 
was an instrument of the organization or mutual 
adjustment of differences in interest or in occupa- 
tion. In receiving it as a return for services, in 
giving it in payment of taxes, in use of it as the 
commodity in which all other commodities were 
one or in which all potentially resided, in regard- 
ing it as having value to the self only in posses- 
sion or as serving immediately no vital function, 
no such function, for example, as that of satisfying 
hunger or affording shelter or pleasing the eye, in 
receiving it by inheritance or in willing it to others, 1 
— in all these different ways the individual made 
unity or equality external to himself, but at the 
same time recognized a basis of an organic mutual 
adjustment among the members of the society to 
which he belonged. 

Evidently the individual that was freed by the 
movement of the Roman mechanism became not 
only a religious creature by nature, but also a 
mercenary creature. He was both Christian and 
Jew. And, to venture upon an aphorism, it might 
be said that, if Socrates gave Rome her soldier- 

1 Inheritance of property, particularly of money, is by no 
means the least interesting way in which the Christian belief in an 
hereafter has had a worldly counterpart. 



96 Citizenship and Salvation. 

citizens, 1 Christ paid them. He paid them, through 
his people, with money; through himself, with a 
hereafter. Upon payment, however, they began to 
disband. 

In selfish 2 sympathy or instrumental formalism 
we found a general term for both the Christian 
belief in the hereafter and the Jewish interest in 
money as representing the past or heretofore. 
Selfish sympathy was the belief or the interest in 
application as a social force, and we saw in it how 
Christendom was only repeating the conflict of her 
great teacher. Now, however, with more detail 
than before, let us turn to concrete history for 
illustration. 

III. 

Rome in action passed of necessity into Rome 
divided, — into Rome divided, however, in selfishly 
sympathetic parts, the division working down from 
larger to ever smaller parts, from nations towards 
individuals; and, as a result, from being pagan 
Rome became Christian. The process, however, 
had its important incidents as follows. 

It brought, first, barbarian attack and invasion. 

1 That is, persons only by virtue of an assigned status, the 
personce of Roman Law. 

2 Selfish, it ought to be said, not so much in original expression 
as to reflection or retrospection or subsequent interpretation. 



The Death of Christ 97 



Thus the conversion of Constantine, with its effect 
of making the whole empire Christian, heralded a 
rapid decline in the morality of Roman life by 
destroying or at least by greatly weakening the 
sense of responsibility to Roman institutions. 
Rome, like Greece in the days of Socrates, was 
brought into a face-to-face conflict with herself. 
But, whenever a people is in struggle with itself 
invasion is inevitable, being a perfectly natural 
part of the struggle. The weakness within invites 
attack from without; the strength within seeks 
expression without. Invasion indeed, it must be 
remembered, in political history as in individual 
experience, is only an attending circumstance of 
reversion, and progress is ever demanding rever- 
sion. Moreover, now to view the change more 
positively, the social organism that followed upon 
Rome's activity had been an altogether empty 
experience, if danger and final disaster, in perfectly 
visible form, had not come to Roman arms. Thus 
mechanism becoming organism, and paganism 
becoming Christianity, and the Roman arms finally 
even yielding to barbarian numbers were but one 
historical whole, or the related aspects of one his- 
torical movement. Development of the individual 
as member of a social organism at once increased 
his responsibilities, deepened his sense of the mean- 
ing of humanity, and made him in his own feelings 

7 



98 Citizenship and Salvation. 

ever less a Roman subject; and while out of his 
Roman eyes he was looking at his ever less Roman 
self and so preparing to welcome the Christian 
assurance of a soul and a heaven, the barbarians 
were swarming out of the north and the east, and 
it was as if they said : " Here in us is the oppor- 
tunity of which you so abstractly dream. You are 
certainly no longer Romans. Then why try to be 
so? Why make reality a dream when you have it 
so close at hand? " In a sentence, Rome had out- 
grown herself, and, as at all times of outgrowing, 
so at that time nature did not fail to fulfil the 
larger destiny. In the swarming barbarians she 
provided force ; she brought destruction ; she 
created a stimulus answering to the developed 
motive ; she helped a freed but backward will by 
making an apparent necessity. 

But, secondly, Rome's division brought the sepa- 
ration of the Church from the State. The Roman 
Church, as representing the dream, had become a 
distinct institution before the fall. The removal 
of the capital to Constantinople had helped to 
bring this about by increasing the temporal power 
of the Bishop of Rome. In point of fact, so strong 
and so independent did the Church become, it was 
able to preserve both itself and the learning and 
the culture of the past, and with these eventually 
to overcome the victorious barbarians. The fall 



The Death of Christ. 99 

of imperial Rome was the rise of a still powerful 
ecclesiastical Rome. " The organization of the 
Latin State," we read, 1 "vitalized by a new 
spiritual force, vanquished the victors. It was 
the method and the discipline of this organization, 
not the subtlety of its doctrine, nor the power of 
its officials, that beat in detail one chief with his 
motley following after another. Hence, too, it 
came about that Christianity, which was adopted 
as the religion of Europe, was not modified to suit 
the various tastes of the tribes that embraced it, 
but was delivered to each as from a common foun- 
tain head." And again, 2 " when the surging tide 
of barbarian invasion swept over Europe, the 
Christian organization was almost the only institu- 
tion of the past which survived the flood. It re- 
mained a visible monument of what had been, and 
by so remaining was, of itself, an antithesis of the 
present." Or, in terms repeated from above, it 
showed how a motive, developed in the past, was 
determined to apply to its own purposes the 
apparently blind forces of the present. 

And, thirdly, closely connected with the separa- 
tion of the Church was the rise of the bank as also 
a distinct social institution. Indeed, as so much 

1 J. Watt. The Latin Church : St. Giles' Lectures, 4th series. 

2 E. Hatch. The Organization of the Christian Church. 
p. 160. 



ioo Citizenship and Salvation. 

has led us to think, the history of the Church in 
its relation to the State and the history of the 
bank belong together. Church and bank, as insti- 
tutions in which Heaven, or the abstracted future, 
and money, or the abstracted past, were treasured 
or even hoarded, were naturally identified with 
the State, until division set in, since upon their 
abstractions imperialism depended. After divis- 
ion, however, their divorce from the State was 
inevitable, for their function, in the beginning 
imperial, naturally continued to be international. 
In them the original unity of the divided whole 
was preserved. 

Nor was the separation of the bank from the State 
one whit less complete than we know that of the 
Church to have been. It did not, of course, come 
about all at once, but internationalism also took 
its time. The power of the Lombard and Floren- 
tine money-changers, however, and of the numer- 
ous banks of the Medici, and notably of the Bank 
of St. George at Genoa, shows how far the separa- 
tion had gone in the Middle Ages. Of the last, 
the famous Bank of St. George, we learn 2 that it 
lived in complete independence of the govern- 
ment, " a state within a state, a republic within 
a republic," the " cradle of modern commerce, 
modern banking-schemes, and modern wealth," 
1 See J. T. Bent's Genoa, ch. ii. 



The Death of Christ. 101 



forming in " its constitution, its building, and its 
history, one of the most interesting relics of 
mediaeval commercial activity." But its independ- 
ence was incident to its natural international 
function, to its being the basis of unity in life 
among a number of extremely self-centred peoples. 
Like the Church at the time it was an agent of 
selfish sympathy; and this the more, as it was, 
although within a particular state, yet independent 
of the particular government. 

As a matter of course, the Church and the bank 
were in the heat of the conflict to which they 
owed their origin. Thus the persistence of mili- 
tarism made them both institutions in which the 
hereafter and the heretofore respectively were 
hoarded assiduously, while the new impulse, the 
Christ-motive, to an organic social life imposed a 
constant check upon the tendency to hoard. It 
had been Christ's part to bring Heaven down to 
earth, and to make his people use their accumu- 
lated experience. He made the future an actual 
motive and the past a substantial instrument. It 
was, then, the part of the Christ-motive that sur- 
vived to do the same. Social organism, whether 
in international relations or in the separate lives 
of different peoples, required, on the one hand, that 
coin be brought into positive and direct earthly 
relations, becoming but one commodity among 



102 Citizenship and Salvation. 

other commodities, and, on the other hand, that 
Heaven represent a future that could be defined 
in terms of actual conditions here and now. At 
just the moment, accordingly, when bank and 
Church had fully accomplished their separation 
from the State, the Reformation occurred, and 
capacity, or power, as the natural source of right 
to property and so a substantial basis of credit, 
was set up in protest against mere coin for medium 
of exchange; and justification by faith, against 
ecclesiasticism. 1 

But, finally, a fourth incident of Rome's division, 
and an incident very closely related to the fore- 
going, was the separation of the imperial monarch 
from distinctly earthly relations and responsibil- 
ities. The monarch became something of a figure- 
head, a large part of his original power being 
delegated to others. He became spiritualized, 
and with the change his dependence on money 
and Heaven for authority was made absolute. 
Other monarchs, rulers over parts of the original 
empire, rose into prominence, and were said for a 
time to have received their power from him ; but 
their real sovereignty lay in the individual re- 

1 It here occurs to me that in passing I might suggest to those 
Germans who have wished to find a romance in social evolution, 
that the heroine in the case, as some have recognized, is the 
Church, while the hero must be no other than the bank. So at 
least can history be made biological. 



The Death of Christ 103 

sources of the particular peoples over whom they 
ruled, and the delegation of power came to be 
looked upon as a mere fiction. Yet, historically, 
it was not a mere fiction, since the imperialism 
was an antecedent condition of the internation- 
alism. In the delegation of powers, too, in the 
spiritualization of the imperial ruler lay a natural 
check to monarchy and militarism. Plainly delega- 
tion implies limitation. Thus, from the standpoint 
of the spiritual ruler, who was, of course, the Pope, 
war among the parts of the empire seemed treach- 
ery, it seemed and indeed was wholly unnatural; 
and accordingly he held for a long period the place 
of peacemaker among the nations, he was the 
seat of international law. And from the stand- 
point of the several monarchs below him, war 
was unnatural also, for the simple reason that 
it was become wholly inconsistent with the basis 
of sovereignty. Hence militarism got its ten- 
dency towards armed neutrality, and monarchy, 
as Rome fell, became " limited." The Pope him- 
self was, and still is, the " limited " monarch par 
excellence. 

We often wonder how it happened that Rome's 
achievement was never repeated, but plainly there 
is no need of wonder. A military monarchy, 
merely upon expression of itself, creates its own 
natural check. A repetition of Rome was, there- 



104 Citizenship aiid Salvation. 

fore, absolutely impossible. Not only did the 
efforts at repetition fail signally, but also they had 
to fail. Simply, neither in Rome's time nor in 
later times, did might make right; or, to put the 
case in most general terms, after division had 
taken place, and we have seen that it had to take 
place, no resulting part could ever really will 
literally to repeat the life from which it had 
sprung. Impulse to repetition might exist, and in 
fact did exist, but not without some restraint from 
within as well as from without. No part could 
will to repeat the whole without doing the incon- 
ceivable, unnatural thing of willing to betray com- 
pletely its own individuality. In short, the effect 
of the division was to throw each resulting part 
back upon its own peculiar characteristics and 
resources, back upon its own peculiar environ- 
ment, for the natural sphere of its self-expression. 

So, whether we view the course of history since 
the days of Rome from the standpoint of limited 
monarchy, or restrained militarism, or a divorced 
bank and church, whose hoarding even because of 
the divorce was checked, or of barbarian invasions, 1 
we see how Rome came to her fall. Even like 



1 Of course philosophically the discovery and settlement of 
America was a barbarian invasion. In 1492, however, Rome had 
so far overcome herself that the invasion appeared rather as op- 
portunity than as danger. 



The Death of Christ. 105 

Christ, who had interpreted her to herself, she died 
for the sake of an organic social life. 



IV. 

But in still another way, and to me a very sug- 
gestive way, I would with a very few words show 
how Rome through her own self-expression came 
to decline and fall. In her spiritual monarchism, 
in her Jewish finance, in her jurisprudence, and in 
her literary formalism she did but fulfil and apply 
the Christian or Jewish idea of mediation. 

Thus Christ, the fulfilment of Jewish life, as the 
World-Reason or the Word Incarnate, was God 
alive on earth, and the inner meaning of God liv- 
ing on earth was that the natural medium of man's 
self-expression, be it language, or political institu- 
tions, or coin, or a church, or what you like, was 
original or absolute or of intrinsic worth. All the 
different means, or media, of expression were 
made divine, and naturally at first the mediation 
seemed to be from another world. Hence the 
Roman theocracy with its reproduction of the 
city-state of the Greeks and its deified imperator. 
Hence, too, the idolatrous worship of Christ him- 
self. Hence the scholasticism of the middle ages. 
Hence the imitating and copying and engrossing. 
Hence, finally, all the formalism for which Rome, 



106 Citizenship and Salvation. 

spiritual and temporal, is known to-day, and from 
which, as Rome's natural heirs, we are not yet 
free, whether in our schools or our churches or 
our places of business or our social life generally. 

But Christ and his people at the Crucifixion 
triumphed over Roman as well as over Jewish 
formalism. They showed that in originality or 
divinity of the medium of self-expression lay a 
complete refutation of formalism, not a justifica- 
tion of it. They demonstrated most emphatically, 
and history since their time has repeated the 
demonstration, that an original medium brings in- 
dividual freedom, not individual subordination, — 
that it is a principle of the organization of differ- 
ences, not of social conformity; and, in con- 
sequence, as we have seen, the other-world 
mediation, on which Rome was founded, changed 
with her decline to mediation in the conditions 
and the realities of the world here and now. 

Briefly, the life of God on earth did not mean, 
and mankind has refused to understand it to mean, 
that the natural medium of self-expression is a 
dead language. 

V. 

FINALLY, the fatal interpretation of Rome's ac- 
tivity came to her not only in Christ, the prophet, 
but also in the art and the science and the 



The Death of Christ. 107 

philosophy that grew out of her repetition of his 
life, — defining it to her with increasing clearness 
and often with thoughtless cruelty, and in the end 
even betraying her altogether. 

The great cathedrals and the great paintings 
and the great epics were Rome's attempts to nat- 
uralize, or acclimate, her supernatural authority. 
They were virtual arguments from the analogy of 
the supernatural to the natural, and they were as 
disastrous as such arguments always are. In them 
Rome sought to justify herself, but they only 
marked the sunset, golden and impressive, of her 
career. The Renaissance came with them. 

And of the science I say only this. It was 
logic, interested merely in the abstracted medium 
of expression, in the Word Incarnate. 1 But, 
strange to say, although confining the reason to 
what seemed at the time an altogether appropriate 
and legitimate sphere, it found occasion to discuss, 
and in a timely way, the vital topic of the relation 
of part to whole, of individual to class or " univer- 
sal." It was indifferent about the special phase 
of the mediation, spiritual or political, physical or 
literary, although from the nature of the case the 
literary had most attention. It simply concerned 

1 The Word Incarnate, as already implied, must be taken to 
refer to all the media of expression, not merely to written and 
spoken language ; to Christ, to abstractly physical nature, etc. 



io8 Citizenship and Salvation. 

itself with individuality, and moved in the direc- 
tion that art was already taking. Thus it con- 
cluded that the unity of a group of individuals 
was not abstractly, or monarchically, or super- 
naturally determined, 1 and also, as complementary 
to this, that individuals were not in themselves 
naturally unrelated or without unity, 2 but that 
each individual naturally had in himself the super- 
natural " one " or " universal." 3 So long as this 
conclusion remained a doctrine of logic, so long 
as it was nothing but abstract or merely " physi- 
cal " science, it was safe. A doctrine of logic, 
however, it ceased to be, so soon as it had been 
clearly stated ; or at least, as a first step, it at once 
sanctioned an inductive science; and induction 
was fatal to the authority of Rome. 4 

But philosophy 5 followed logic as closely as 
logic had followed art, and the fatal interpretation 
was quickly brought to its natural limit. It is 
always the part of philosophy to carry to a limit 
whatever is assumed in an existing order of things. 
Thus, if you should imagine monarchy fully to 
realize its own ideal, the condition into which the 

1 As Realism had insisted. 

2 As the unwittingly sympathetic Nominalism insisted. 

3 Conceptualism. 

4 Of course logic became inductive as Rome's division ap- 
proached its limit, the individual person. 

5 Metaphysics. 



The Death of Christ. 109 

monarch and his subjects would come is exactly 
that which Spinoza defined as belonging to what, 
in his more general terms, he called Substance and 
its manifold modes. All that he said of substance, 
you would have to say of the monarch. You 
would find the monarch one, infinite, indivisible, 
self-existent or independent, self-intelligible or 
infallible, and you would give him as his essential 
attribute or prerogative a freedom of all limita- 
tions in space and time. And all that Spinoza 
said of the modes of substance, you would have 
to say of the subjects of the monarch. You 
would find them dependent upon each other only 
through the monarch himself; you would find 
them absolutely individual; you would find them 
not themselves substantial, but expressing the 
essential attributes of their substantial ruler. In 
short, you would conclude that Spinoza was say- 
ing, only in his philosopher's way, exactly what 
Louis XIV. at about the same time was both say- 
ing and enacting. " I am the state," Louis XIV. 
is reported to have said. But also you would see 
that a monarch, whether on the Bourbon's or on 
Spinoza's terms, would be a mere figure-head, a 
sheer abstraction for a condition, realized in the 
state, that must be quite inconsistent with subjec- 
tion to any personal monarch. " I am the state," 
upon becoming true, would become also the most 



no Citizenship and Salvation. 

empty boast. It became that in history, did it 
not? I do not mean at once, but in course of 
time. Even Spinoza's monism was not appreci- 
ated at once. Rome controlled even the Jew 
Spinoza's mind. 

Leibnitz, however, made one correction of 
Spinoza, and a correction that we are quite ready 
to applaud. Thus he said, in so many words, that 
on Spinoza's own terms individuals must be more 
than " modes" of a self-existent, self-intelligible 
substance; individuals must be independent self- 
active forces, the subjects of no monarch but 
monarchs all themselves, each with the same attri- 
bute, or prerogative, that Spinoza had given to 
his Substance. But this thought of Leibnitz is 
quite in line with what we saw some time ago, 
when we observed how political mechanism or 
imperialism upon fulfilment and expression of 
necessity communicated its own power and will 
and responsibility to each part acting in it. Only 
in Leibnitz's time the individual part was not the 
nation but the person, Rome's division having 
reached its limit. Leibnitz, however, although 
seeming to make the individual supreme, saved 
himself from being charged with a philosophy of 
anarchy. Like Spinoza, although in a different 
way, he remained loyal to the traditional order. 
He was not ahead of his times. In his doctrine 



The Death of Christ in 

of a pre-established harmony he paid his tribute 
to Rome, to whom tribute was still due. 

And after Leibnitz came Immanuel Kant, the 
last great Roman in philosophy, who, although 
making an important reservation, ascribed to the 
essential nature of the individual person all that 
Rome had assumed for her imperial self at the 
beginning. Indeed, it was as if he saw the sub- 
jects of Rome coming at last into their natural 
inheritance. Thus he declared, and I would dwell 
upon the words, that space and time Y and causa- 
tion' 1 were natural endowments of the individual, 
not properties, or primary qualities, of the exter- 
nal world. But, and this was his reservation, he 
made them endowments of the mind, not of the 
soul ; he made them forms or bases of knowledge, 
not forces or motives to action. 3 The heirs of 
Rome, accordingly, were free to observe or know, 
but not yet free to act; although intellectually free 
from the limitations of space and time and causa- 
tion, they were not spiritually free in the world of 
their experiences; although become scientists, 
they still remained soldiers in Rome's army, and 
their life had still to look for mediation in another 
world. 

1 The attributes of Spinoza's Substance. 

2 Leibnitz's self-active force. 

3 Kant's reservation obviously had the same general purport as 
Leibnitz's doctrine of pre-established harmony. 



ii2 Citizenship and Salvation. 

But they were like soldiers without the needed 
leader, in whom the other world could reveal 
itself. The very freedom that had been given 
them had taken their leader from before their 
eyes ; or, if with a leader, they could not hear his 
orders, nor know his purposes, nor in any way 
relate themselves to the sphere of his interest 
and activity. They might know knowledge ; they 
might blindly do deeds, acting from no other 
motive whatsoever but that of duty, the habit of 
loyalty still controlling them ; they might turn 
slavish officials; but the service of a leader, whom 
they could see, was once for all denied them. 
The Word, it is true, was left ; but the Word In- 
carnate, as at the time of Christ's death, so now at 
the time of Rome's death, had gone whence it 
was said to have come. 

And if we have never wondered that Judas 
killed himself, we certainly cannot wonder that in 
Kant's time there were those who, finding nothing 
to know but an idea and nothing to do but a 
deed, concluded, although quite in a doctrinal way, 
that suicide was the only means to complete self- 
realization. Had not Rome's division reached the 
individual person? And has the individual Ro- 
man, has the soldier, anything but death to look 
forward to? Should he not, then, as if with a 
consummate heroism, bring death upon himself? 



The Death of Christ. 1 1 3 

No, said Kant; for never by his own will could 
the individual deny his loyalty to the Word. 
The individual could never do anything but loyal 
deeds, and his suicide would be distinctly disloyal, 
since it would bring him to a denial both of him- 
self and of the whole to which he belonged. As a 
suicide, in short, he would have to do the impos- 
sible thing of becoming traitor to the motive of 
his own act. Or, to make Kant's reasoning quite 
concrete and historically real, while it may be true 
that death is the soldier's natural goal, yet this 
is very far from meaning that death is also his 
natural motive. Were it to become his motive, 
he would cease to be the soldier that he was, and 
so would have it no longer as his natural goal ; or, 
were he able to take his own life, he would no 
longer have the reason for doing so. At the very 
moment of action, should he arrive at it, dark 
though his life might seem, he would find himself 
more than the soldier of an unseen leader, he 
would find himself self-active, an independent 
agent, the master at least of the tool of his own 
destruction, his own leader; he would come at 
last into his complete inheritance, the Word rising 
again in the life of its still loyal servant. 

And Kant, accordingly, as if in view of this 
promise, gave to his individual another selfhood 
than that of the soldier-scientist, and to the world 



ii4 Citizenship and Salvation. 

another reality than that of a possible object of 
mere knowledge. He said, it is true, that the 
individual's other selfhood and the world's other 
reality were unknowable; but at his time and 
from his standpoint, Roman that he was, he could 
have said nothing else. His teaching, however, 
meant, alike in its own inner logic, and in the 
history which it has reflected so accurately, that 
knowledge, whenever put into application, brings 
its possessor into a substantial independence of its 
mere forms, or that, as we saw before, the soldier 
in action ceases to be a soldier. 

So was Kant not only the philosopher of Rome's 
downfall, the last great Roman philosopher, but 
also the herald of a new life that was to come. 
With the dogmatism of a prophet, a dogmatism 
that in him, as in others, has been too often criti- 
cised, he declared that faith still had an object. 
He was loyal to the past; but so fully did he 
define it that the future, of which the people had 
long been dreaming, was shown to be at the hour 
of its realization. The downfall of Rome, like the 
death of Christ, was not occasion for despair. 



$att III. 

RESURRECTION. 



H 



THE CHRISTIAN STATE. 

I. 

OW far this third part of the present study- 
is necessary I cannot determine, but draw- 
ing conclusions always seems so idle and so un- 
complimentary. If it does not cast unwelcome 
reflections upon the reader, it certainly does cast 
them upon the writer. It is quite like the child's 
way of naively labelling his imperfect picture ; or, 
with special regard to the interest here, it is as if, 
like the doubting Thomas, one could not see with 
one's own eyes what had become already present 
and visible. And yet, true as this is, I face the 
accusation that will be cast upon me and ask my 
question: What is it that we see? But I remem- 
ber, perhaps with a little comfort, that although 
Rome's fall was years ago, the people of the world 
about me have not yet ceased to stare in vacancy 
and wonder. They, too, have been asking : What 
is it that we see? 



3- 



n6 Citizenship and Salvation. 

What we and they have seen is the simple 
process of Rome's division. Doubtless Carlyle, 
with his senses so much more awake to all the 
incidents, would have called it rot or decomposi- 
tion. But, names aside, we have seen, as inti- 
mately related to Rome's decline, the limitation 
of monarchy, the growing dependence of different 
peoples upon their natural resources, the widening 
of the Roman or Christian-Jewish influence, and 
the rise of a would-be militant and imperial 
finance and of a not less tyrannical ecclesiasti- 
cism. 1 Other incidents there were also, such as 
loss of patriotism and rise of moral irresponsi- 
bility, and such as art, science, and philosophy; 
but we found that we could bring them all 
under one formula, discovering in them all evi- 
dence of a progressive abstraction, or " transla- 
tion," of the medium of expression, and with the 
help of one of the philosophers we saw that this 
abstraction reached its completion so soon as the 
division had found a limit in the individual 
person. The Medium, the leader, the Incarnate 
One, was at the last shown to be as unknowable 
as he had been infallible. 2 Language became 
dead. 

1 Even Protestantism, it must be remembered, as opposed to 
Romanism, has been only a reactionary ecclesiasticism. It has 
not yet brought an essentially different Christianity. 

2 Of course the change is illustrated in the Papacy losing 



Resurrection. 117 



But the fatal conclusion of the process was 
significant, because it brought to the hour of its 
birth, in the individual persons of the empire, the 
motive and activity that had originally been com- 
munalistic or imperial, and, as has been intimated 
already, this closing chapter is added only to 
show beyond all possibility of doubt the reality 
of the new birth. To any, who will examine its 
marks, the individualism of our own time is Rome 
risen again ; in it the Word has been fulfilled in 
a resurrection. 



II. 

But recall how we were able to say, as if in 
sympathy with his subjects, that the Roman em- 
peror was God alive on earth, and how we dis- 
covered the closest connection between the decay 
of imperial monarchy and the decline of mili- 
tarism. The connection, moreover, was an evi- 
dence to us of the reality of the Christ-motive, 
or of the impulse to organism, trying to free itself 
from social mechanicalism. But one phase of the 
process, perhaps the most significant of all, has so 

its temporal power, virtually a century ago, although nominally as 
recently as 1870, when Rome became the capital of the Kingdom 
of Italy. For the decline of the Pope's power in the eighteenth 
century see Pennington's " Epochs of the Papacy," ch. x. 



u8 Citizenship and Salvation. 

far escaped our notice, although throughout it 
has been before our eyes. 

To monarchy has belonged a peculiarly Chris- 
tian function. Whether we look to the Roman 
emperor or to the monarchical ruler over smaller 
dominion, we see in the monarch the tendency to 
become a mediator in the very special sense which 
religion has given to the name. Thus, although 
naturally at the head of the army, he is in all other 
political offices of ever lessening importance, and 
so appears as one who assumes his people's out- 
grown past, namely, their militarism, and by 
drawing off so much of their political sinfulness 
accomplishes their political salvation. And his- 
tory, be it said also, in order to show how com- 
plete the obvious analogy may become, has 
demonstrated more than once that his death, 
instead of merely his partial limitation, may be 
necessary for a complete realization of a peo- 
ple's freedom from its sinful past. Why, Thomas 
Hobbes, theorizing about the state and its origin, 
and trying to give a philosophical justification of 
the claims of the Stuarts, unwittingly showed the 
monarch in just this light. He made the monarch 
the personal agent of the people by contract, and 
the monarch is the agent of the people, but by 
nature, not by mere contract, and of so much of 
the people's activity as they are outgrowing, not 



Resurrection. 1 1 9 



of the activity newly arisen among them; he 
stands for what they are ceasing to be, not for 
what they are becoming. 

How morally corrupt a monarch and his court 
become, as the check upon militarism asserts itself! 
To the new life he and it feel ever less responsi- 
bility. The duty that his people recognize he and 
it cannot know. Such is his position that lawless- 
ness is impossible to him ; he cannot transgress. 
In his life, then, one sees repeated, although rather 
as so much natural process than as the responsi- 
ble action of an individual's will, the career and 
the achievement of Christ. 

But, says some one, such a repetition of Christ's 
achievement in the monarch's life is the merest 
fancy, founded on some unwarrantable metaphor. 
Yet it is no fancy; it is no metaphor. Was not 
Christ's death a signal triumph over militarism 
and all its incidents? And the Christian doctrine 
of salvation, what is it but peculiarly of salvation 
from the sins of war? In the Pope, too, the 
function of Christian mediation, belonging to the 
military monarch, has had a very positive expres- 
sion. Not, however, until one has followed the 
mediating process from the papal apex of the 
feudal pyramid to the populous base can one 
adequately measure the vitality of the Christ- 
motive at work in it. 



120 Citizenship and Salvation. 

The feudal pyramid is so much more a history 
of Europe than a monument of any particular 
time. It is so much more a force than a formal 
condition. We may not wonder that the ordinary 
observer fails to see the molecular movements 
and the dynamic character in general in the mate- 
rial object, but how historians have been so often 
blind to the living process in feudalism is hard 
to understand. No man can really watch the 
pyramid attentively without seeing in it an upward 
and a downward movement, the effect of which, 
in fact, is to make it more sphere than pyramid, 
and which in itself is none other than the double 
movement of history. For is it not plain? As 
with the successive divisions and the progressive 
delegations and limitations of power the base 
itself at last becomes, so to speak, a manifold of 
apexes, as the people at large finally become 
monarchs, but limited monarchs of course, the 
pope becomes nothing but a spiritual figure-head. 
Simply, the process is one in which the principle 
of monarchy is gradually secularized or popular- 
ized — this being the downward movement — and 
the monarch himself is gradually spiritualized — 
this being the upward movement, and we do not 
need Heraclitus to tell us that the way up and the 
way down are the same. We know, however, that 
monarchy brought to the base of the pyramid, or 



Resurrection. 121 



the monarch made figure-head, is democracy, and 
we have to conclude that in democracy, if ad- 
judged from its origin, all being monarchs, all 
must be also living expressions of the Christ- 
motive. Feudalism, in fine, as dynamic, as a 
process instead of a condition, means nothing less 
than this. In it, from the beginning, there was the 
certainty of the liberation of the individual. 

In a word, democracy is the inevitable goal of 
monarchy; not, however, in any fatal way, but in 
fulfilment of an inner motive ; and in democracy 
the individuals are still Romans, since each will 
have imperial rights over some single line of 
activity, and will in this be the saving monarch 
of all the others. Have we not seen how the 
action of a political mechanism not only divides 
the original whole, but also creates differences 
among the parts? The differences, however, are 
not by nature in conflict ; rather are they the related 
phases of one life ; so that the different parts ex- 
pressing them must act, one and all, in the interests 
of the whole. " Division of labor " the process is 
often called, but men have not usually noticed just 
how division of labor was made possible, nor how 
it liberates, in the mutual relations of the separate 
laborers, the essentially Christian functions of in- 
carnation, resurrection, and salvation. 

You fail to catch my meaning? I seem to be 



122 Citizenship and Salvation. 

using most sacred words idly and even irrever- 
ently? In my understanding of the evolution of 
democracy from monarchy you cannot allow me 
even the idea of an inheritance of mere functions? 
But I ask you only to consider how the assump- 
tion of any special phase of a society's activity 
must make the individual assuming it the mediator 
and savior of society in respect to just so much 
of the social life. Indeed, my notion is this, that 
just so far as an individual expresses his own 
individual selfhood he is without sin himself, but 
has at the same time taken upon himself what for 
all others of his kind has become sinful. Surely 
it is the natural right of each individual to ex- 
press himself, and also no two individuals are 
alike. All, however, are mutually dependent, 
else their individuality would be without meaning. 
The free expression of any one, then, brings re- 
demption to all the others ; or, to cap these com- 
monplaces, society is an organism whose own 
freedom of action depends on the integrity of that 
of its separate members. 

We talk of the conflict of good and evil, but 
we might call it the conflict of democracy and 
monarchy. The criminal is by nature a monarchi- 
cal leader, revealing the sins of those who con- 
demn him ; and his judges, at the moment of his 
crime, are but so many soldiers marshalled in his 



Resurrection. 



123 



cause. Only remember that it is as much the 
indifference of others as the interest of the offender 
that makes a crime possible. He is the will, but 
they are the force. Was it not indifference that 
made Rome's activity possible and that brought 
the birth of Christ? Society, moreover, in one 
way or in another way, always crucifies the crimi- 
nal in whom it sees itself condemned. The two 
thieves, on the right hand and on the left hand of 
Christ, belonged there. 

And if the criminal is by nature a monarch, the 
monarch is also by nature a criminal. 1 This, in 
fact, we have seen already. But, I say again, 
changing my words, that the monarchical or indi- 
vidual leadership of others must ever bring law- 
lessness upon the leader, and lawfulness upon them 
that follow. Thus the political " boss " leads on 
such terms ; and so, too, the money-king. Licen- 
tious gods, also, have saved their worshippers. 

So, obviously, to conclude this analysis, crime 
with all the evil that attends it is an incident of 
social evolution as useful as it is painful. It 
accompanies the decomposition that turns mech- 
anism into organism. It is the past rising in con- 
demnation of the thoughtless conventionalism of 
the present. It is, finally, monarchy through the 

1 Or law-breaker. It would be interesting, from the stand- 
point here taken, to study the history of Jurisprudence. 



124 Citizenship and Salvation. 

vitality of the Christ-motive passing into its new- 
life, democracy. 1 



III. 

But the individuals of the modern democracy 
must be Romans also. As is said above, each one 
must have imperial rights over some single line 
of activity. Yet just how can this be? Plainly, 
only through the invention and use of machinery. 
The Roman, you remember, at the moment of 
possible suicide found himself no longer a soldier, 
but a person with a tool in his hand, and the will 
to use it, but not on himself. The tool, of course, 
revealed to him a new way of gaining the wished- 
for independence of the limitations of space and 
time. If, then, monarchy has risen again in de- 
mocracy, militarism has had its resurrection in 
industrialism or the commercial use of machinery. 

Industrialism, however, is nothing new in itself, 
although its birth in the individual person is com- 
paratively new. Industrialism began, at least for 
what we know as the Christian era, at the very 

1 How unintentionally keen the lawless author of the " Fable 
of the Bees " was ! 

Thus of society : " Every part was full of vice 

Yet the whole mass a paradise." 

And again : " Such were the blessings of that state, 

Their crimes conspired to make them great." 



Resu rrection. 125 



moment when the division of Rome began. At 
the moment of division the resulting parts, as we 
have found, were thrown back upon their indi- 
vidual natural resources for their appropriate 
spheres of self-expression, and this only means 
that they were made to face the necessity of 
realizing their Roman selfhood, or of repeating 
their Roman activity, in the narrower confines of 
individual environments. 

Now, I am neither mathematician nor economist, 
but one hardly needs to be anything, except an 
observer, to see that with such necessity would 
come the mechanicalization of those individual 
environments. The former militarism would be 
inhibited, but only that the freedom in space and 
in time which it had effected, might be adapted 
to the new conditions. Adaptation, however, 
would obviously bring the invention and use of 
machinery and consequently the rise of indus- 
trialism. True, industrialism began with agricul- 
ture; but simply because division began with 
nations and classes. Certainly it was an agricul- 
ture in which the land came to be used scientifi- 
cally or mechanically. The early system of rents 
and the condition of the toilers are evidence of 
that. Again, I know that it was a form of indus- 
trialism whose commerce among the parts was 
rather through strife and lawlessness than through 



126 Citizenship and Salvation, 

any clearly intended co-operation ; but the motive 
to free exchange and organization was not want- 
ing. Only as the division worked down to its 
limit could the motive to commerce expect to be 
finally free. The liberation of the individual and 
the free application of his independence of space 
and time could not come all at once. 

We have seen that the Greek mathematician 
reached the conception of the atom, or infinitesi- 
mal indivisible unit, at the same time that Socrates 
came into the conviction of an unworldly, or 
spaceless and timeless and immaterial hereafter, 
and also that, so long as the conception and the 
conviction were only negative, they were sanc- 
tions of Rome's political mechanicalism. Christ, 
however, and his people made them positive, 
turning them into motives or principles of self- 
expression instead of the mere principles of self- 
denial that paganism had found them, so that it 
was by no strange coincidence that a life con- 
trolled largely by the longing for heaven, and a 
science of mechanics which applied the infi- 
nitesimal, not as a composite part, but as a me- 
chanical force, to physical phenomena, developed 
together. 1 But the application, I repeat, brought 

1 Certainly to see this intimate connection between the longing 
for heaven and the dynamics of the infinitesimal is to conclude that, 
whatever may be said of theology, science and religion have not 



Resurrection. 127 



industrialism, and with it the resurrection of Rome's 
armies. Industrialism has had, naturally enough, 
its own incidents ; for example, the post, the press, 
the telegraph, the engine, the factory, and all the 
various means of communication and transporta- 
tion and commercial manufacture; but, one and 
all, from early times to the present day, they show 
mechanical force in use, and in use with the 
natural 1 result, that social life the world over has 
been made ever less dependent on conditions of 
mere time and mere distance, and that the individ- 
ual has come ever nearer to securing imperial 
power even in the expression of his own individual 
selfhood. 

Now do we see, perhaps more clearly than 
before, what Kant meant when he allowed to the 
individual no inheritance but that of the principles 
of space, time, and causality. Those principles 
show Kant's way of reporting the power to use 
mechanical force that the individual had gained 
from his past; and Kant's " thing-in-itself," the 
world in its ultimate reality, was the world as a 

been so much in conflict as has been commonly supposed In 
heaven man has hoped for a freedom from this world's limitations, 
and in the infinitesimal, not less spaceless and timeless than heaven 
itself, he seems to be nearing, if not to have won, what he hoped for, 
1 " Natural," because the effect was already in the cause. The 
infinitesimal, as abstraction for mechanical force, contains in itself 
the freedom of space and time limitations. 



128 Citizenship and Salvation. 

perfectly free mechanism, 1 which the individual 
was absolutely free to use. But Kant, the Roman, 
checked the freedom, as if it were after all only 
theoretically real, enjoining rather the life of the 
keen observer, the soldier-scientist, than the life of 
the revolutionist. Revolution came, however, and 
violently in some quarters, although nowhere with- 
out some evidence of evolution. The activity had 
to come, since the philosopher could do no more 
than accurately define the conditions upon which 
it was to take place. He might define the force, 
but he could not destroy it. He might bid men 
look before they leaped, but he could not stop 
their leaping. Was not the mechanism usable? 
And was not the activity as old as Rome herself? 
And the activity, the use, as it came, brought the 
death of the soldier and the birth of the mechanic, 
in whom — so we are able to say here — there 
resided the certain promise of both an imperial 
power and a substantial Christian responsibility. 

1 Of course the noumenon, which was " unknowable " only in 
so far as not used ; but, when used, spaceless and timeless. Pure 
mechanics has the Kantian noumenon in the particle as an atom of 
force moving in the infinitesimal time-interval over the infinitesi- 
mal distance. 



Resurrection. l2 9 



IV. 

BUT a democracy, a Christian state, has among 
its institutions a bank and a church ; and to these, 
in view of all that has been said above, we must 
give special attention. 

3 Of the present time, in which democracy is 
so distinctly the vital ideal, 1 it may be said that 
a large part of the Bank's legitimate business is 
carried on outside of the Bank itself, —for example, 
by the express companies, by the telegraph com- 
panies, by such publications as Bradstreet's and 
Dun's, by the various trade-journals, and even by 
the newspapers. So true is this that one has no 
choice but to conclude, in terms which should by 
this time have a meaning here, that banking has 
risen, the stone having been rolled away, even 
while its mere devotees were worshipping at the 

sepulchre. 

Yet what is the Bank's legitimate business? 
Well, aside from the heretical agencies of banking 
just referred to, it seems to me that in the growing 
futility of hoarding, 2 in the lowering rate of inter- 

i Witness the conflict of those complementary opposites, 
unsocial individualism and un-individualistic socialism or com- 

mU 2 n HoTrding has always been met by a demand for fiat-money ; 
but this is only the reaction, and in itself can hardly be said to 
have checked the evil. The interaction, however, of the dogma of 

9 



130 Citizenship and Salvation, 

est, and, above all else, in the increasing use of 
credit-instruments, 1 such as checks, notes, bills of 
exchange, and the like, we have an evidence, 
which is even final, that the Bank's real business 
is to make commercial intercourse possible for all 
members of society without the necessity either of 
personal intercourse or of transportation of coin. 
Is any other conclusion possible? Is the assump- 
tion by the Bank of any other function than this 
desirable? 

What it all means, of course, is that in the 
Christian state, in which the individual is to be a 
Christian through having imperial rights over a 

hoarding and the fiat-heresy, has brought the real check. Thus, 
although the banks have hoarded coin or specie, and to-day 
probably more persistently than ever before, yet their hoarding 
has lost or is fast losing its military power, credit succeeding 
specie as the medium of exchange. The Incarnate Medium, 
whether silver or gold, is dead (or at least on its death-bed). 

1 The last report of the Comptroller of the Treasury spe- 
cially recommended laws to encourage the issue of credit-instru- 
ments. Also two illuminating incidents in the history of German 
banking happen to come to my notice even as I am writing. 
The first is the rise of the group of land-credit and land-mortgage 
banks at the time of the seven years' war, and the subsequent 
extension of the system to the cities, with great benefit to the 
agricultural classes and to the population at large. The second 
is the curious use that has been made by the Germans of a large 
part of the famous French indemnity fund. Thus they have 
laid it away, for use in case of war, but have also put it into cir- 
culation through an issue of notes not necessarily redeemable. 
Both of these cases show the relation of militarism to the cur- 
rency, and the change that peace demands. 



Resurrection, 1 3 1 



single individual activity, namely, over his own 
complete self-expression, no other medium of ex- 
change is possible than that of credit, of inalien- 
able, unquestionable, substantial, dynamic credit. 
But what would be the source of such credit? 
Exactly that which is its source now, the me- 
chanic's power to apply the world's force. And 
what would make such credit a possible medium? 
Exactly what makes it a medium now, the power 
of accurate and prompt information or intelli- 
gence the world over. Let the Bank be what in 
so many ways, although quite as much without as 
within its visible self, it already is, an institution, 
not for the keeping of treasure, but for exchange 
through credit. 1 Let it be an institution through 

1 Of course it is obvious enough, as so many economists insist, 
that credit cannot be an absolute, or generally used, medium 
except on a perfectly free international basis. Thus, under inter- 
national bimetallism, coin would cease to be the medium ; credit 
would have to take its place. Bimetallism marks a process, not 
a condition, and the end of the process is credit. International 
bimetallism, in other words, would make the visible medium not 
even dual but as manifold as the commodities to be exchanged. 
And I sometimes wonder, as I reflect upon the part that the 
Chinese finances took in our recent campaign, and as I at the same 
time look hesitatingly into the future, if it may not be in the 
further evolution of human society the part of the still uncivilized 
or only partially civilized oriental peoples to set credit finally free 
in commercial life. At least, when credit is free, I should look for 
their admission into a perfectly free and correspondingly world- 
wide commercialism. Certainly they have been at least one 
degree more traditional, more conventional, more credulous, 



132 Citizenship and Salvation. 

which any individual part of society can know, 
with the promptness and the confidence that 
action demands, exactly what capacity for action 
belongs to all other individual parts. 1 Let it be a 
thoroughly useful social institution, not an institu- 
tion that is useful only to a particular class, and 
that marshals others into an army of mere ser- 

than the Jews were, and at the proper time might be expected to 
bring the past, in their consciousness so much more remote, so 
much longer cherished, so much more completely defined and 
organized, into the actual use of mankind the world over. 

1 The social organism, it is frequently said in these times, is 
not analogous to the individual organism, at least in respect to the 
seat of its consciousness. Society, the contention is, has no cen- 
tral consciousness, no single will. Yet political philosophy and 
psychology have always been most curiously parallel. Along 
with spiritual monarchy there has been a spiritual, monarchical 
psychology, first expressing itself in logical terms (cf. the abstract 
idea or concept), then later, upon the protestant reaction, in 
physiological terms (cf. the brain as monarch of the body). Psy- 
chology has had its feudalism too, its doctrines of association by 
contiguity and abstract similarity and arbitrary classification, and 
of " idea-centres " and arbitrary " reactions." And, not to make 
the story too long, psychology is saying to-day with great clear- 
ness that the soul, or self, is not a resident of the body to which 
some special locality can be assigned, but a principle, a function 
of the body's activity ; and, as to consciousness, this rather identifies 
itself with the particular organ in action than adheres to any arbi- 
trarily selected part. Of course the idea of organism has made 
such a psychology possible. Moreover, if society is found to be 
an organism, I know no reason why, upon the discovery, the idea 
of organism should not become in itself an organizing idea. If 
society is an organism, then the organism is not exactly what 
hitherto it has been supposed to be. The analogy, then, may not 
hold, but that is not society's fault, nor the fault of any form 
of reality. 



Resurrection. 



vants. The Bank should make it possible for 
skilled labor to find a market. 

I have called credit dynamic, and you must see 
why it is dynamic. It sanctions the movement of 
machinery; in the popular phrase, it "turns the 
wheels of industry." Indeed credit, as such a 
thinker as Spinoza would be likely to say, is only 
an attribute of the real substance of industrial life, 
the other important attribute being machinery. 
For the substance, however, society has a name. 
Thus credit and machinery are the two inseparable 
attributes of the substance "capital." Credit is 
capital on the side of mind; machinery, on the 
side of matter. Moreover the common definition 
of capital as wealth in actual use or expression, or 
as productive wealth, is quite in accord with this 
Spinozistic account; and perhaps no conclusion of 
the whole analysis is more striking than this, that 
in the Christian state labor and capital cannot 
represent two classes, but one. Make credit the 
basis of exchange, and you will find no laborer 
that is not also a capitalist and no capitalist that is 
not also a laborer. The individual in the Chris- 
tian state is not an owner of mere wealth on the 
one hand, nor yet on the other an owner of mere 
bodily force; he is self-active, having in himself 
both wealth and force ; he is a mechanic, a skilled 
laborer. 



134 Citizenship and Salvation. 

Now, a moment ago, I said that the Bank should 
make it possible for skilled labor to find a market, 
and doubtless I seemed to be asking what might 
in many cases be quite impossible ; but the simple 
fact is that through its very origin skilled labor 
must always have some exchange value. Its 
value, it is true, must be measured by the social 
demand, but the social demand will be propor- 
tional to the integrity of the laborer's individual 
self-expression. The important fact, however, is 
that individuality has a natural value in exchange, 
and that in consequence to ask the Bank to find a 
market for it is not to ask an impossibility. But, 
you say, it is to ask what is only theoretically 
possible, and I answer that nothing is quite so 
practical as a theory that defines what has been 
done and is being done every day in the year. 
Such a theory only urges mankind to do more 
thoroughly, more comprehensively, more vitally, 
what it always has been doing. Let the Bank, 
then, do for the individual in the remotest villages 
and in the humblest stations what it now is doing 
for the more favored classes in the towns and 
cities. 1 In short, let it do its part toward making 
a free individualism successor to the competitive 

1 Our cities with their congested life are largely the result of 
money the medium, instead of credit ; of imperfect communica- 
tion and uncertain transportation. " Postal banks " are a move- 
ment in the right direction. 



Resurrection . 135 



individualism, from which even to-day we are 
suffering. 

Three aspects of one thing, — that is in fact what 
we have now before us : first, a free individualism ; 
second, a freely moving mechanism ; 1 and, third, a 
credit-bank. And of the second of these I would 
add that in it, in machinery, exactly the same 
essential function is served as that which language 
serves. Indeed written and spoken language is 
but a part of the complete mechanism of expres- 
sion. Some, I know, have thought of language as 
the basis of an absolutely common life among 
individuals, as the mere medium of the exchange 
of abstract thought; but certainly language is not 
that. Language is a great deal more. It is a 
medium of individuation or of social organization 
or of the mutual adjustments of individuals. It is 
a basis of a socially organic activity. The mediae- 
val logicians did well to identify it with Christ, 
the Word ; but since their time man has found 
himself individually self-active in other ways than 
the ways merely of reading and speaking and 
writing. 2 

1 Of transportation, communication, and manufacture. 

2 This tempts me to speak of the resurrected school, but upon 
it I think I can leave any possible reader to think for himself. In 
regard to the larger idea of language, here suggested, I venture to 
refer to an article of my own on " The Stages of Knowledge," in 
the Psychological Review for January, 1897. 



136 Citizenship and Salvation. 

And the thought to which I would here give 
expression is a large one, and I know not how to 
state it adequately to myself. It brings such 
extremes together. It shows how, underlying the 
change from natural force as applied through the 
movement of armies to natural force as applied 
through such great instruments of social expres- 
sion and individual redemption as the engine and 
the press and the telegraph, there is only a motive, 
original in man's life, realizing itself. If you have 
followed and understood, you have seen how it 
Christianizes or spiritualizes the most material con- 
ditions of life, and, more than all, how it materi- 
alizes, that is, how it makes positively and actually 
real on earth, real and so possible, the Christian 
life, freeing the Christian impulse, making Chris- 
tianity anything but a mere sentiment. Still how 
can I express it? I have found, as you see, no 
better account than this. It is resurrection. 



V. 

But to the Church a resurrection also. Exactly 
what was said here of the Bank has been said 
again and again of the Church of to-day. A 
large part of its legitimate business is carried on 
outside its walls. But who can wonder? Have 
not democracy and free industrialism, material 



Resurrection . 137 



conditions though they are, been the means of 
liberating the Christ-motive? Democracy and in- 
dustrialism are saying to Christian people with 
an emphasis never before so strong, " Now is 
the accepted time ; now is the day of salvation." 
In realizing the Christ-function in every individual, 
they call for a freer, more positive expression of 
Christianity. What the Christian is, they seem to 
say, what he is, as it were in spite of himself, just 
that the Christian ought to be. Thus, in the sense 
which I have tried to give the term, the mechanic 
is by nature a Christian. Then the Christian 
ought to be a mechanic wholly responsible to the 
use of his realized opportunity. So, again, who 
can wonder that Christianity has left its church, 
in which the military worship or hoarding of the 
future is still continued? 

Under the Empire it was natural that Chris- 
tianity should be before all else a separate church, 
and only the more as the Empire declined, just as 
it was natural that the other world should be life's 
chief motive, and that men should be soldiers, and 
that money as mere coin should be the medium 
of exchange ; and under limited monarchy, as the 
separation widened, it was natural that Christianity 
should be sectarian, just as it was natural that 
there should be standing armies and competitive 
individualism in general; but under a real democ- 



138 Citizenship and Salvation. 

racy and a free industrialism there must be, in 
place of a separate church and in place of sects, 
a free Christianity. With the change from mon- 
archy to democracy, from a society of soldiers to 
a society of laborers, from coin and armies to 
credit and machinery, there must come a change 
in religion from worship and sentiment to far- 
seeing effective practice or truly mediated Chris- 
tian activity, in short from faith to realization. 

The Church has this great lesson to learn from 
history. Division, or decomposition, is not death. 
The Christ-motive, so vital, so persistent in human 
experience since the Crucifixion, has only re- 
peated its great prophet's triumph. Decomposi- 
tion is not death, but immortality; it is the soul 
struggling toward free expression ; it is the life of 
undying organism. Matter is not composite, but 
organic. After decomposition, then, resurrection. 

Yes, this is plainly the Church's lesson from 
history; and, although it was set so long ago, 
history was necessary before it could be learned. 1 
Now, however, that it has been learned, the 
Church's interest in the salvation of men's souls 
must turn, and has already turned, into the interest 
in their more vital expression. Briefly, the soul 

1 What an evidence of this necessity we have in the " Higher 
Criticism",! Christianity has been so obviously the product of 
retrospective interpretation. 



Resurrection. 1 39 



as organism is neither mortal nor immaterial, but 
both immortal and material ; and neither original 
sin nor original perfection can be ascribed to it, 
since in neither way is it without substantial re- 
sponsibility. Expression, then, is man's single 
duty to it, and expression is possible here and 
now, because already made manifest in history. 

Salvation, however, as already realized in the 
soul's expression here and now, or the more vital 
expression of his living self as man's religious 
duty, must affect the Church in two important 
details : first, in respect to its prayer, and second, 
in respect to its ritual. Is not the Word, in which 
the individual can express himself, the whole world 
of his experience? And is not the individual be- 
come free, or self-active, in the wholeness of his 
selfhood? Once, it is true, only eyes and ears 
were freely his, but now all things are his. His 
prayer, then, and his ritual should change ac- 
cordingly. 

In the resurrected Church, evidently, the only 
prayer to which an answer can come, or which 
can be offered with a real religious faith, is such 
a consciousness as shall define to oneself all the 
conditions of one's life. Real prayer must be 
the earnest, honest, trusting definition of the 
sphere of one's activity ; it must be the completest 
possible knowledge becoming motive. Indeed, I 



140 Citizenship and Salvation, 

think, prayer always has been this, and is this now. 
Anything else is not prayer. But in modern 
science lies the completest possible knowledge of 
the whole self's sphere of action. Then it falls to 
the Church, the institution in which men pray, 
to turn science into motive. Why, what can 
prayer be but mind liberating the soul? 

But you bid me remember that prayer must be 
addressed to some personal being. So it must, 
and the prayer of mind, which is the only prayer 
that the actual Christian can ever offer, is so 
addressed. It is addressed to the larger life, 
to the life in which one " lives and moves and 
has his being; " and by as much as man himself 
is personal, by at least so much is the life to which 
he belongs and to which he prays personal too. 
Must not the answer to prayer always be an act, 
an act of adjustment, an act in which an inclusive 
life is set free in an included part, an act which 
brings the part into a more vital assertion of itself? 
But such an act, bringing its agent into com- 
munion with the life including him, is proof that 
the prayer had been addressed to a personal 
being. The history that we have been studying 
is proof of the efficacy of prayer. " Father, for- 
give them ; for they know not what they do." 
God ever is what those who pray do. 

And, if science becoming motive or mind liber- 



Resurrection . 141 



ating the soul is the natural prayer of the resur- 
rected Church, then its ritual must plainly be 
the action that this frees, or service of the God to 
whom the soul so liberated belongs. Such service, 
however, or such action, is the life of the present, 
and only in a church with this ritual can the 
Christian mechanic, citizen as he is of a redeeming 
democracy, feel at home. Indeed, as prayer is 
mind liberating soul, ritual is body expressing it. 

The Church to-day cannot hoard the future, for 
the future is now and is open to all. It cannot 
make the life of the soul a protected industry, an 
industry by itself, for the soul is actual in all life. 
It cannot be divided by creeds, for its responsi- 
bility is to the lives of its members. It cannot 
seek members, for all men already belong to it. 
And it cannot be founded on a mere sentiment 
for unity, for it is itself unity. 

Then what can it do ? It can do exactly what 
it is doing, but more freely, more earnestly, more 
completely, with more of the self-denial that it has 
so long enjoined. It can identify itself with the 
Christ-motive that lives in society to-day. " Inas- 
much as ye have done it unto one of these, my 
brethren, even these least, ye have done it unto 
me." The Church is no longer the four steepled 
walls, that it has been so long, nor the altar, about 
which men have gathered and sought security in 



142 Citizenship and Salvation, 

the hereafter, nor even the person Christ, who 
lived and taught at Jerusalem and finally returned 
to the Father; it is, above all else, a life that is 
responsible to conditions here and now. 

In fine, in the course of history, State and 
Church are again one. Then an invisible Church? 
Yes, to him that still tarries at the lifeless tomb of 
walls and creeds, but not to him that goes among 
men, not to the citizen. 



VI. 

Socrates, in whom Greek anticipated Roman 
in the conquest of Greece, sanctioned militarism 
and monarchism. Christ at his death interpreted 
to itself the activity that Socrates sanctioned. 
And, as a result of the interpretation, organism 
began its struggle for liberation from the shackles 
of mechanism; and this struggle, beginning so 
long ago and continuing to the present day, has 
been a repetition in the life of human society 
of the career of Christ, a repetition of his strug- 
gle and a repetition of his death. 

And, in our own day, the rising again. 



THE END. 




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